We have gone over the fact before that it is important to keep a backup of your web site, and if you haven’t done so – you should do so sooner rather than later.  However, how many backups do you have of your web site?  I think with the start of the new year, we might all need to make a backup of our web site backups.

Before you claim that I am just overly suspicious of bad thing happening, let me make my case.  What would you do if your web site went down?

You’d contact your web host to find the problem.  Now let us say they lost your web site, and have no active backup.  Well, you could then turn to your own backed up files.

How Should You Backup Your Web Sites

What if your own backup went bad? What would you do then?  Your entire web site, and for some of us that is years of data, would be lost.  So what is the perfect backup solution?

1. Find a web host that does local backups, and make sure you have access to them.
2. Do a backup of your hosting files to your own computer, or to an external hard drive you might have handy.
3. Sign up for an off site backup service. Places like Carbonite.com specialize in offering you unlimited disk space and bandwidth for backing up any files on your computer, including your web site files.  This way you have one more location to get a backed up copy of your web site incase the worst might happen.

Online Backup Providers

Now, I only use Carbonite as an example backup service.  There are many others to choose from, such as:

• Mozy.com
• KeepIt.com
• Amazon.com’s S3 Service

All four of these are great off site backup solutions.

So now that we have a new year, it is time to make one more resolution.  Make sure you backup your backups, because it never hurts to have too many copies, especially right after you lost the one you are looking for.

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