Content Backup

As a webmaster, what is your strategy to store data? Most individual webmasters today have a copy of their pages in their personal desktop. This most often makes up for reloading the files when you change webhosts and you happen not to be able to automatically transfer data. But, the underlying fact among webmaster is that they are too confident of their data being safe on their cyberspace, and so even if their personal copies at home fails or is destroyed, they can make a new backup from the host where it is hosted.

But sometimes, it can prove to be very fatal. This is because, webhosts are not infalliable as they always seem to be. And since there is a lot of information transfer between the host and the individual webmasters, it can sometimes happen that a virus that has attacked one individual careless webmaster can attack the webhost as well when there is a data transfer between the two computers. And so it can happen that this can transfer between the host and you.

It is a very acknowledgeable fact that with better host selection you can minimize or even nullify your risks to a zero percent. But, for a webmaster who holds thousands of pages, it is not an advisable idea.

Here are some things that you could do

Firstly, if you have more than one computer at home, it is always advisable to not plug one to the internet, or best not access your website control panel from there. If this is possible, then a backup in both the computers will help you in getting to have atleast one copy of your backup files remaining, when both your webhost and your internet computer fail.

A second way, though a bit circuitous is to mail a copy of your article content, each time you write one to your own Yahoo or Gmail account. These websites being the topmost secure will get you the backup when required.

There is one option that many webmasters are known to follow, which is however not advisable. It is about having a parallel freely hosted website running which carries your content. This is highly unadvisable because Google is known to be harsh on duplicate content in the web, and if not getting unindexed from the search listings, you will atleast end up losing your search engine ranking.

However, the best option is to use geniuine backup sites that provide backup space for all your critical information. Some are free, but then it is certainly advisable to overlook them as it could be possible that they lose information as fast as you do, and there is certainly no guarantee that they deem themselves answerable. Choose the most relied backup services. I, for instance have backed up all my website information(not blogs :) ) in Swapdrive's Backup.com. You could try the same service, as you already know one who is happy with their service.