If you have read my previous post about what would happen if personal disaster strikes, you will have learned about the importance of having systems in place so anyone can step in and take over your business.

What happens if the unthinkable happens and your sites are hacked or accidentally deleted?

Do you have a backup system in place?

Even if your host backs up your site regularly, if your site is hacked, the backups also may be compromised. What do you do then?

Whether you are doing your own website maintenance or if you have someone else doing it for you, there are some pretty disasterous things that can happen.

Your website can be accidentally deleted from your host server. Yes, I have heard of web designers or virtual assistants cleaning out their clients’ hosting directories and accidentally erasing the wrong site.

Or

You can update your WordPress website and lose all of your theme customizations.

Here are the steps that I take to protect my websites:

1. For my WordPress sites, I install a backup plugin which automates the process and emails me the backup file at regular intervals.

2. Once every couple of months or so I download the complete directory to my computer for storage on my 1 TB external hard drive.

3. Prior to doing any major changes to my sites, especially to my WordPress sites, I download all the files to my computer AND I use the WordPress backup plugin to do a complete backup.

4. I make sure my hosting account also has backups set up.

The more backups the better, the safer I feel.

Have you suffered any website disasters? What systems do you have in place?