I am aware of two websites that have recently been hacked! If you use scripts on your site, it can be quite easy for this to happen, unfortunately. It’s also possible that your web hosting service can have technical problems and lose all your files. You need to be prepared to deal with this situation by backing up your files.
There’s no need to buy any software to do it, either. Here is a free way to backup your websites on a regular basis. Get yourself a copy of wget. The software started out as UNIX software, but it is available for Windows here: WGET for Windows. Alternatively it comes with most Linux distributions, or you can install it as a part of Cygwin if you use that.
The wget program can mirror http and ftp sites. You don’t want to use it to mirror your http site; what you want to do is to copy the contents of the ftp access that you have to your web server host.
I use it in the following way, from a command line prompt:
wget ftp://<my-domain-name> ----ftp-user=<my-user-name> ----ftp-password=<my-password> ----mirror
It performs an incremental backup, so if you have a file on your backup directory that is the same as the one on your site, it will not be transferred. This mitigates against problems caused by excessive bandwidth use. The first time you run it, of course, a full backup will be performed.
Set up a regular schedule in Windows for the tool, perhaps once a week or maybe even once a day, and you’re done!
Note that MySQL databases, subdomain access lists and/or any other functions may require separate backup arrangements.
If you need any help to run this program, please leave comments on this post, and I will help you out with it.
David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer
