Backing up your Web site? The why and how.

Written by Jelmer van der Linden on January 10, 2017

With your computer you have the option to restore the computer to a restore point in case of a (fatal) software error. Perhaps you remember a time when you were very happy with that. But most web shop owners do not keep a backup of their web store, while the chance of something going (fatally) wrong here is just as good. We would therefore like to explain the why and how of making a backup of your web store.

Why should I keep a backup of my website/webshop?

If all goes well, your web store is constantly evolving. When making all kinds of adjustments, you run the risk of making mistakes, for example because certain newly added code creates conflicts that make the web shop inaccessible. In that case it can be faster and safer to restore the web store to the older version than to look for the exact reason. For this reason, many large parties have a copy of the web store available for testing. Should something go wrong then something goes wrong with the copy of the web store and not with the live version of the web store. This kind of backup is also advisable, especially if you want to make larger changes." [caption id="attachment_63101" align="aligncenter" width="2708"]

Always make sure you have a recent backup of your web store[/caption] If you have had your web store created by a web design agency, don't just assume that they will back up your web store. However, web design agencies often offer service packages, these packages usually include service components such as keeping plug-ins up to date and saving a backup of the web store every day. If your web design agency offers this then it is advisable to ask about the cost of this. If, in your opinion, the costs are too high, you will have to make your own backups. A good solution for this is a NAS-server on which you can automatically back up your web store every night. And a NAS-server doesn't have to be very expensive these days, for as little as 130 euros you can have an excellent NAS-server. Of course, it all depends on the amount of data (terabytes) you want to be able to store.

How should I backup my web store?

As you understand, running a backup is important if you have an online store. Because what if you suddenly lost days or even months of work filling products, changing web pages or even a complete new website if your website crashes? If you run continuous recent backups of your web store then you always have a recovery option available. In most cases, a web store is stored on an FTP server. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol and is used for uploading files to your website. Connecting to FTP is done through an FTP client. The database itself usually contains all the textual content of your website, blog or online store. The database is stored on the database server; among other things, the web pages, blog posts and comments. Therefore, in order not to lose important information, it is important to back up both the FTP and the database. This can be done locally, by saving the folder on the server to your desktop, or it can be set up to automatically save it to your NAS server every night. The latter is probably the nicest option because then you don't have to worry about it every time. In addition, if you have a friend who also has a NAS server at home, you can exchange data with each other so that a second backup exists of both your data and your friend's data. This is useful in disaster scenarios when something happens to your own backup on the NAS. If you have a web store built via theSAAS model, i.e., you rent a piece of space for your web shop from such an online platform (mywebwinkel, ccvshop etc.), be sure to ask them how they have arranged the backups. By default, they make a daily backup of their entire server park containing all the webshops. In the worst case, they can restore all webshops at once if everything goes down. If you have accidentally deleted all categories or if you have suddenly lost all your customer data, this is unfortunately something that they usually cannot recover. Should you experience problems with your web shop and you want to restore it, chances are they cannot restore individual backups. It is important to ask about this and to see what you need to backup yourself!

Conclusion

Running a backup of your web store is extremely important, because in case of errors you can always restore your web store to a previous version. Do you run your own backups of your store and do you have any tips for other merchants? Of course we would love to hear them. Please leave a comment on this blog.