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Protect_Your_Online_Assets
| Protect Your Online Assets
Many of us have spent countless hours developing and refining
our websites. Also, if you deliver electronic content (ebooks,
art work, software) you have spent much time creating these
goods as well. Don’t risk losing everything! Make sure you can
always get back to where you were by having multiple backup
versions. First a couple of basic points: Most hosting providers
perform backups on a regular basis (weekly, daily, or on
demand); You should always have a local copy on your own home
computer or burned to CD. Now with that said, there are still
some open issues. What if your hosting provider only provides
weekly back-ups and you make a change to your site, publish it
with your editor (or FTP it), and then discovered some mistakes
that were difficult to roll back from, and now the hosting
provider has backed up your mistakes? If you don’t change your
content much this may not be a problem. Most of us have Zip
disks or read/write CD drives at this point, but not everyone.
Also, what if your local copies are destroyed say in a home
fire, or if your local computer disk drive crashes and you had
no copy (come on -- admit it, I know you're out there)?
In the interest of protecting your online assets, it is
important to save your website to an online storage site. Most
businesses store their important data files offsite, and here is
a way for you to do the same--for free. Many web-based storage
sites allow plenty of space to store large files, so you can
save daily or weekly snapshots of your site as needed. You can
also register for more than one of these sites; and the good
news is that there are still a few that are FREE! I will tell
you how to find them shortly.
First, here is an example of how you could use these services.
If your hosting provider creates weekly backups (say on
Sundays), you can make a snapshot of the site prior to
publishing any changes and save it to the online file storage
site. This way you can always rollback if there is a problem.
(Make sure you zip it before you store it!) Once the hosting
provider executes its weekly backup, you can decide whether to
delete the online storage version. Personally, I know that
sometimes backups are not checked by hosting providers, and if
they are not diligent about verifying saved data or replacing
old tapes, you may find that the one day you need a file or two
restored, that the data is corrupted.
There is a great site at http://useful.webwizards.net/wbfs.htm
that lists all the web-based file storage sites currently
available. Note that not all are free services. I’ve looked at a
few of them (and use some of them as well), and thought it would
be a good idea to mention a select few:
* Yahoo! Briefcase
If you have a Yahoo account, this is a great free service at
http://briefcase.yahoo.com. You get 30MB for free. You can share
these files with others by designating which Yahoo users can see
your files. They even have Yahoo! Drive client that lets you
access your files right from your desktop. You can get more
space for a small fee of about $2 per month.
* X-Burn
This is a great service; they are at
http://www.xburn.com/index.html. You can have any files off your
hard drive burned to CD and shipped to you for a total cost of
$5.95! They will even back up your website directly from the
Internet and send it to you on CD. This is a great deal for
those who don’t yet have a CD burner.
* BraveNet File Storage
Bravenet.com offers a lot of great FREE services, and if you
have an eBusiness, you should sign up now! One of the things
they offer is 100MB of file hosting (more than any other
service), which can be used to store files as a backup, or as a
web presence. Plus a ton of great webmaster stuff. You have to
register, but it's free.
About the author:
Michael Martone is the webmaster at ProfitMonkey.com and is also
the editor of the free newsletter Ebiz Edge. Additional articles
on eBusiness and a Free welcome basket are available at
http://www.profitmonkey.com/newsletter.html
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