If you’re depend solely on your web host to do your daily backups, you are risking your web site’s very existence. Most web hosts only keep your web site backups for a day. This practice seems fine most of the time. What I am afraid of is when an inept web host that does not discover a problem with their web server within 24 hours of your last working web site backup. When they finally discover the problem, they may only be able to restore a corrupt web site backup because of their daily backup policy. An event like this may destroy your web site if you do not backup your web site files to your own computer or to a remote server.

This happened to me more than once and lucky for me I do daily MySQL database backups and FTP synchronization backups. I have tested a lot of MySQL database backup scripts and I found mySqlDump Database Backup to work best for me. I use multiple Cron jobs to schedule all my database backups. The output of the script is a “gz” file, which is similar to a zip file. I had to edit the source code of this script to prevent it from deleting the previous day’s backups.

Now that I have daily backups of my databases on my web server, I run FTP Voyager every night to download all the database backup files to my computer. FTP Voyager has a scheduler program that allows me to specify which folders of my web site I would like to synchronize with the folders on my computer. I usually select the “upload folders” and database backup folders to be synchronized to get the latest files uploaded by my visitors or myself downloaded to my computer.

You may use other tools to get the job done but I highly recommend a more sophisticated FTP program like FTP Voyager because it allows you to schedule downloads. Setting this daily backup regime may take some work but it may very well save your web site and your business.

Tagged As: database-backup, FTP-Voyager, MySQL

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