I thought I would take the opportunity to remind everyone of the importance of backups. We had a very bad incident last week with a past client - Backpacking Queensland - where their hosting company has somehow been corrupted and they have lost their entire site - at this stage it would also appear they have lost the backup of the site also (we don’t know why this is; whether the backup was not being done properly or whether the backup has truly been corrupted as their main server has).

Unfortunately for Backpacking Queensland Xebidy had no ongoing relationship with them and so we were not holding any backups either, however, we do have the last beta version before the site went live and we were able to resurrect this on our own hosting solution. We will do our best to assist them in rebuilding their site as fast as possible.

Mat has also been able to build a script which retrieved all the page which Google had indexed and from there we are also hoping that we will be able to rebuild many of the pages this week.

Regardless the important point of this post is to ensure that either your IT staff or you hosting company are doing a backup properly. It is a very wise measure to test these backups regularly also. It is only when something has gone wrong do people actually go to their backup an find that this was not set properly or that something else was wrong with it.

We are Xebidy have certainly taken this opportunity to do a review of our own internal processes for out code and are setting up new measures. Make sure you are not the next to be caught out!

Tags: hosting

This entry was posted on Monday, May 12th, 2008 at 7:24 am and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.