Supplement Your Manual Backup Efforts with an Automated Backup Solution
Running and managing a website is a continuous process. You need to design a great site, create engaging and unique content, and buy one of the best web hosting plans ensuring reliability, security, and performance of your site. However, the list of tasks does not end here. You need to manage the website constantly and run updates, look for security vulnerabilities, etc. regularly too. While a managed hosting plan can take care of most of these tasks as well, there is one process that most site owners like to stay in control of – website backup.
The backup of a website is the ultimate failsafe for a site owner that can help restore the website if all security measures fail, and the site gets infected. Some site owners prefer taking manual backups of their websites, while others rely on automated tools alone. While both these methods have certain pros and cons, today, we are going to talk about a way in which you can use them both to create a reliable backup process.
In this article, we will talk about how you can use automated backup solutions like CodeGuard Website Backup to supplement your manual backup efforts.
What are manual and automatic backups?
As the name suggests, a manual backup process is one where you manually take the backup of your site whenever you deem necessary. You can use a tool to do this or manually download all files and data and create a backup. While this allows complete control over the process, you have to ensure that you find time regularly to take a manual backup. If you get too busy for a few days and forget backing up your site and the site gets infected, then there will be no way to retrieve the data generated since the last backup.
On the other hand, an automatic backup is a process that you use an application to automatically run the backup process for you. This can work according to your selected backup schedule and will require no manual intervention. Hence, you can be assured of having the latest backup at all times.
Comprehensive Backup = Manual Backups + Automated Backups
A comprehensive backup strategy for your website should be the perfect combination of manual and automatic backups. Most site owners taking manual backups prefer to have the backed up files on their local machines. This is a good practice since it ensures that you have complete control over the backed up files. However, tools like CodeGuard can make the process of backing up easy and efficient. Once you start using CodeGuard and allow FTP access to your site’s MySQL database, it starts backing up your files automatically. It constantly monitors your server and appends the backup file if you make any changes to the existing files. It stores the backed up files on Simple Storage Service (S3) – the cloud platform of Amazon Web Service (AWS).
Hence, while you can continue taking manual backups at intervals comfortable to you, if you add CodeGuard to your list of tools, you will never have to worry about having an outdated backup file.
Summing Up
Remember, the purpose of a website backup is to ensure that you can restore the site within no time if it crashes or gets corrupted for any reason. In today’s times, websites generate volumes of data every day. Hence, not having an updated backup can interrupt your site and damage your business. Ensure that you leverage the benefits of manual and automatic backups and create a process that works optimally for you. Good Luck!
