Good Habits – Backups and Version Control

Just a short article with a couple of tips today. Do you backup your websites regularly, if so, how often? And when developing a new website, do you use any kind of version management tool? If you rely on any website to make you money, you should be doing both!

Backups

The justification for backups is pretty obvious and substantial. How would you fix a situation where…

• Your web host gets hacked?
• Your web host goes bust, and the hosting services are revoked immediately?
• You accidentally do something that corrupts your site’s database?
• Your site gets hacked, destroying all or part of your file system and/or databases?

You get the idea. Having both backups of files and databases is very important. I’ve needed my backups about 5 times in the last 2 years, each time saving me several days and weeks of effort to fix a problem.

How often should you backup? Well, how long is a piece of string? My guidance is to backup files daily, and backup databases at a rate that roughly represents how frequently your site is updated. Perhaps 3 times a day, perhaps just once a day.

Regardless of how often you do backup, there will come a time when you are grateful for having those backups. There are so many different backup tools, it depends on your own personal setup. But, if you’re not very technical, it’s worth spending some money on a good backup tool.

Version Management

Version management is a little more debateable in terms of how important it is. How often have you developed a website, and thought, “actually, I prefer it the way it was 2 weeks ago”?

If you have multiple website developers, version management tools help you to control how code evolves during a project. If you’re the sole developer, it acts as a fine-grained backup tool, allowing you to access prior versions of code with ease.

I personally use Subversion, which integrates nicely with Windows Explorer and Eclipse PHP Developer Tools (Eclipse PDT) with Subclipse.