Recently I learned a very difficult lesson, and that’s to do backups often.  It’s something that my boyfriend, Steve, tried to teach me over and over, but I guess sometimes you have to learn the hard way.  That’s exactly what happened on Friday.

About 8 months ago we started renting a server for our business website and email.  We were very slowly migrating all our sites onto this server.  We used to have our own server at a business partner’s home who lives in Los Angeles.  But His internet connection had some problems, so we decided to rent a server out here.  We did this because one, the server would be close to us so Steve could fix any problems faster.  And two, because they should have a more reliable internet connection.

What we didn’t expect was to not be allowed to have access to the drive if it blew up, and wouldn’t be able to try and get the data off of that drive ourselves.  So on Friday when our server went down, there wasn’t much we could do except pace, and get frustrated.  The company we rent the server from will be trying to get the data off of the dead drive, but we’re not hopeful that this will happen.

Although even Steve wasn’t updating all the sites regularly, we did have an older back up of at main business website.  So that at least is good.  We did maybe loose most of our emails, which isn’t a crisis, but is an inconvenience.  However, my website, Wyndsong Writes, had a lot of new articles and posts on it, that were not saved recently.  So I lost a lot of my work, including a contest that I was holding on the site last week.  Very upsetting!

Luckily I can at least get the posts back from going to Google and searching for my site and getting the cached versions of it.  Which means I don’t have to REWRITE anything.  However, all of the comments are gone.  Which is a bummer.  And it means I have to do a  lot of work to get the articles back up and my website looking like it did recently.  Which I will be doing over the next several days.

What I will also be doing is adding backup plugins to all my blogs so that they are all backed up every day!  I would suggest that you do the same thing.  These are the two plug ins I’m using, after researching them online, WP-DBManager & WordPress Backup (by BTE).  Don’t wait to learn this lesson the hard way, go get these two plug ins and start backing up your blogs today!