New Poll: How Do You Back Up Your Websites?

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Chris Coyier on (Updated on )

What if you hosting provider calls you one day and tells you they had a catastrophic fire at their facility and every bit of data on their (your!) servers is gone!

It’s highly unlikely, of course, and it’s more likely that your host does a better job of backing up data than you do. But… it’s certainly possible and ultimately, you are responsible for your sites. If you do client work, the duty of backing up is even more important!

So how about it folks? How do you back up websites? Do you do it at all? I have to admit I’m not as good at it as I should be. What I do is periodically download the entire contents of a site (include database dumps) and throw them in backups folder locally. My entire system is redundantly backed up, so I figured I’m cool there. I wish I was using something a bit more automated though.

And the choices are…

  • I don’t. (you should!)
  • I download the files locally. (and back those up)
  • Doesn’t my host do that for me? (maybe, you should check)
  • My host does this for me. (I checked)
  • I have some kind of automated solution. (do share!)

The actual poll is over in the sidebar! RSS Readers will have to make the jump over to the site to actually cast your vote.