You’ve read about it in computer magazines and on internet forums, the guy in your local computer store has advised you to do it as has your tek savvy mate… ‘back-up all your computer data, keep at least two copies, use software to enable regular back-ups of your computer system, if you make any changes to your computer system, system registry etc back it up first… before you install any new software make sure you have a recent back-up of your system just in case anything goes wrong…’.

But how many of us actually do it…?, how many of us are guilty of thinking ‘…oh it’l never happen to me, it’s only the people who actually do something wrong who screw their computer up…’ or ‘I’m only making a small change/installing a small program what could possibly go wrong…?’

And most of the time nothing does go wrong… we install/delete programs, sometimes make hardware changes and get these nifty little useful or quick fix shareware programs which are supposed to make life easier for us, but when something does go wrong… well let me tell you about my little experience…

It was a tuesday evening, I had a little bit of time to kill before leaving for work for a night shift, I have two blog sites… one I am developing weekly through being mentored on the John Thornhill Marketing Masterclass, and the other which although I am kind of developing in parallel I am also using it as a test platform for various scripts. Eventually that second site will take on a style and business function of it’s own but for the moment it will serve as my experimental site.

Now earlier that day I had just received the header and footer graphics from Steve at Planet Divinity, and I wanted to get them uploaded to my site before leaving for work… so I logged into my wordpress control panel, saw there was an update available so decided to do that first. I was prompted to back-up my blog first, now part of me just thought about skipping that ( I must have been having a lazy moment) but I thought I had better not chance it and backed up to a folder on my desk top.

The update went smoothly, as most do, then I uploaded the header and footer graphic images using fileZiller ftp, that went fine, edited the footer graphic and saved changes ok, but when I tried to delete my blog name and tag line (the original pre graphic, which was displayed over my new shiny header) and clicked update… something went wrong and it all went pear shaped and appeared to have corrupted the data base, so I could no longer access my blog! or wordpress admin panel… talk about panic… I think I forgot to breath for several moments… i’d say it seemed like my life was flashing before my eyes, but I think it was just the memory of hours of work just evaporating into nothing, and that god aweful ‘…oh no what have I done…?’ feeling.

I didn’t have much time, so I did a quick google and came up with some info, I logged into my site cpanel, went into Fantastico, brought up wordpress and found where there was a button to ‘repair database’ ‘YES’ I thought… clicked it, got a message saying database was successfully repaired, tried to go to my blog but still no joy, the repair had not worked after all, ‘Shite’ I thought… what now? I figured I needed to uninstall wordpress from my domain, that done I had to re-install it again.

Thankfully Fantastico is good at what it doe’s and in no time at all wordpress was up and running on my domain again, now I just had to import the data i’d saved before my ‘little’ problem occurred.
…..and that is when I had a bit of a disappointment, you see the wordpress backup feature only actually saves your posts and link categories, so even after you have imported your saved data you still have work to do up loading your theme, graphics and redoing your links to other sites… hardly what I would consider a proper backup!.

After redoing what needed to be done I closed my laptop, kissed my wife and headed off to work feeling in a pretty good mood, and why would I be in a good mood after experiencing near disaster? after witnessing first hand one of those ‘it’ll never happen to me…’ moments where I pictured my whole internet marketing world come crashing down around my feet? because in the space of just forty minutes I had turned disaster around , re-established my blog and internet presence, swopped fear and frustration for an incredibly valuable and positive lesson, become that little bit stronger through my experience and may well have set in place a slightly altered mindset which will keep my internet business that little bit safer in the future… the fact that I have managed to increase my knowledge of cpanel, fantastico, wordpress and exporting/importing backed up data also leaves me with a good feeling too, you see I just love learning… even when it is done the hard, scary way!.

And when I got home after my shift? I went on a back-up frenzy!.

Now if you take one thing away from my experience let it be this… BACK UP YOUR DATA…ALL OF IT, DO IT NOW! because you never know it could be you who disaster strikes next, and if and when it does you want to be damn sure you have everything you need to get you back up and running as quickly and easily as possible, learn from this because I dont want you to feel like your world is about to end…

To you CAREFULLY BACKED UP success…
Pete.

***After this episode I discovered a wordpress plugin called myEASYbackup… this backs up your entire wordpress installation, everything including your theme and graphics, and downloads and saves it to your computer, I now have this installed on both my blog sites***