Can you survive a catastrophic event?

Friday, May 14th, 2010 at 7:48 am

Yesterday I saw an article from my good friend Alex Syseof about “WordPress Security Scare, Are You Impacted?” I recommend you check it out but it brought to mind something that is important but often gets overlooked.

Are you prepared for a problem with your blog?

What happens if your server crashes and the host does not have a backup?

These are scary thoughts to say the least but it is quite easy to do the Boy Scout thing and BE PREPARED for the unexpected.

It really is not that hard to do and if you are prepared the above scenarios won’t really effect you for long.

Understand that there are two things that make your blog work. The actual files that create the script and display your content and the data base that contains all of your content.

If you have both of these backed up in a safe place you can easily recover quite quickly. Now I sometimes seem to look at things like this from a paranoid perspective. Of course if it actually happens I am no longer paranoid but have great foresight.

I was hacked many years ago on a blog before I started using WordPress but was lucky that my web host had all the backup files and was able to restore my site for me but since then I have tried to never have to depend on someone else to get this done.

It is easy to keep a copy of all the server files on your hard drive. I have a portable hard drive that has all of my website files on it. When I make changes I copy the changes to it.

The data base backup can be even easier. Use the WP Data Base Backup plugin to automate this.

Set up a special Gmail account and have the data base backups sent there. You will need to check (I check my special Gmail account once a week) to be sure that they are actually happening. One of the problems with automating this is if you do not check regularly it may stop working and you won’t have what you need when you need it. (I know a paranoid thing with me.)

Keep 30 days of backups there so that if you got hacked and did not realize it you should still have a data base backup that was not compromised.

If you have done these two things here is how you can recover from a worst case scenario (your server totally crashed and they have no backups) quickly. Being paranoid I always use more than one web host so if something happens I will have some things still working. Now to move to one of the hosts that is working and get my blog back online.

[hidepost]I login to my domain registrar and change the name servers to a different server. Log in to that server and set up the domain as either an add on or a new domain depending on the type of hosting I have purchased.

Create a new data base in cPanel and edit the wp-config file in my server files to the new name. Upload all of the files I have on my hard drive to the new server. Run the install command to set up your new blog.

Finally I will open up phpMyAdmin and import the last good data base backup up into the new data base. Now my blog is up and running again in less than an hour.

It may take a bit longer depending on how fast your new domain propagates. With my isp nameserver changes usually propagate in a few minutes but I have friends where their isp can delay propagation for hours.[/hidepost]

Being prepared and having your content in a safe place can be the difference between a big problem and a minor annoyance.