Once again, I’m trying something new with the Friday Archive Dive. If you’re new to the site, you can read the entire post, which originally ran on Jan. 31, 2013, in its entirely. If you’ve ever been curious about the kind of information, tutorials and advice that you’ll get as part of your subscription to Webcomics.com, this is a good sample. 

You probably already know about the Great Website Outage of 2013. So let’s talk about backing up our Web sites.

It’s not enough to assume that your Web host couldn’t fall victim to this sort of thing, too. If your Web site is important to your livlihood, you’d better take a few moments every month and make sure you have your own back-up just in case.

DIY

Of course, there’s the obvious answer. Download all the files from your Web site to your own computer and whisk it off to an independent drive.* Heck, you may be able to delegate this to one of those little Flash drive you can get for about $20 at Target. As long as you do it somewhat routinely, you should be able to mitigate any damage that could be done by a hacker.

*Note: Member AndyL notes, “Woa, slow down. It’s not this easy, of course. You need to also back up your database!” Read the comments for more information. Thanks, Andy!

Services

Of course, the problem with the DIY option is that you have to remember to do it on a regular basis. And then you have to actually do it when you remember to do it — and not put it off because there’s a more pressing issue at hand. For that, you could us a service like CodeGuard that offers to do your back-ups for you for a monthly fee. You may be able to get away with the Personal Web Site plan, which offers a daily back-up for only five bucks a month and covers 5 GB. There are others — like Backup Machine and DropMySite — which offer similar services.

Other options

AMAZON S3

You may also want to check out Amazon S3, which backs your data up to the cloud. You’ll have to load some software on your server, though, so do a little research first.

DROPBOX

I love Dropbox.com. And it’s feasible that you could use it to back-up your Web site. WordPress-users can use this handy third-party app to get the job done painlessly.

Emergency!

If you’ve been hacked and your site is down, the first thing you need to do is get the bare bones of the site up and running again. You may not be able to get the archive running immediately, but you can at least post today’s comic along with a blog post explaining the situation to your readers. And you’ll probably want to get you ads running as well. To that end, don’t overlook the usefulness of the Wayback Machine, which may have a recent crawl of your site that you can swipe the page code from. In a pinch, it’s a quick way to get something posted fast.

What about you?

You you have a back-up method that’s not listed above? Wanna share a back-up experience with our members? Please add your comment under the original thread.