ACtion Magazine - January/February 2015 - (Page 25)

When disaster strikes Angie Kilbourne W hat would you do if you realized your business' website was solution you choose, ensure your backups are done regularly (I recomgone one day? Not a simple matter of your hosting provider's mend once a week) and check the validity of the backups. You can save as service being down, but all your ﬁles, photos and other digital many backups as you like, too. I recommend keeping at least two of the materials that make up your website completely wiped out. No problem, most recent backups, just in case something happens (such as corruption) you would think, right? You can just call the hosting company; they have to your most recent version. backups. But what if you can no longer reach the hosting company? The As the New Year kicks off, make this one of the resolutions you keep. phone is disconnected, and no one responds to your emails? Your business - and your sanity - will thank you. ❆ Don't think it could happen to you and your business? Think again. The UK-based online magazine 3:AM Magazine experienced this exact scenario in 2012, losing 12 years' worth of published material. The story eventually had a happy ending, but it took weeks of sleuthing by the magazine's fans and readers to help track down the hosting company's owner, who had divested himself of the hosting business years earlier and not even realized he had a server still running in Hungary. But 3:AM's editorin-chief's quote to U.K. newspaper The Guardian should be a lesson for us all: "I should have backed it up somewhere else, but it never occurred to me." Digital disasters can happen at any time to any person or business. The Library of Congress says the causes of a digital disaster can be "natural (such as tornadoes and earthquakes) or failures of infrastructure (such as power failures). Disasters may result from intentional human action (such as cyberterrorism) or simply human error (such as accidental deletion)." It only takes seconds for all of a site's ﬁles to go missing - ﬁles that might have taken years to build on. And to be honest, personal computers aren't the only targets for hackers and malicious code; websites and hosting servers are just as easily corrupted. How long would it take you to rebuild your website in the event of a digital disaster? Would it take longer than a couple hours? More importantly, how much business do you think your shop would lose without its online presence? Do you backup your site and store it offsite with a third party? You should, and on a regular schedule. Don't rely on your hosting service's backups because they might not be there when you need them most. Restoring your site may not even be part of your hosting contract with them. What you need is a recent backup of your site that covers nearly all the updates you've made to the site, if not all. There are automated programs to take care of this task for you. If your website is built on a content management system, such as Wordpress, there are plug-ins and extensions you can employ that will take care of backing up and storing the precious material wherever you designate, such as Google Drive, DropBox or your own computer. Even if there is no automated solution for you, you can simply copy all the ﬁles from your website via FTP to a computer or to a cloud service. But whatever Reader Reply January/February 2015 * ACTION 25 http://www.omega-usa.com/ http://www.omega-usa.com/ http://www.macsw.org/imis15/MACS/Publications/ACtion_Reader_Reply/MACS/Publications/ACTION/ACtion_Reader_Reply.aspx?hkey=ac24bddb-c045-442a-813c-cbf05f88ac4d

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of ACtion Magazine - January/February 2015

Outlook
Service Port
Leonard's Law
Member Profile
Compressor clutches
Recognizing career achievement
Virtual View
Heavy duty and off road
Industry News
Association News
New Products
Last Watch

ACtion Magazine - January/February 2015