Posted Saturday, October 25, 2008

Let me introduce Hope Wilbanks, a writing friend of mine. She has learned a very hard, very valuable lesson. Please listen up as she shares some amazing, heartfelt advice.

Even Writers Need to Back Up

Written By Hope Wilbanks

Photo Credit: http://www.sxc.hu/

We writers tend to be a creative bunch of people who think we are immune to nasty little buggers like website hacks and corrupt databases. It’s hard for us to even think about upgrading to the latest version of Word Press or downloading database backups.

What happens when you attempt to log into your writing blog, though, and are met with an ugly error message? Your pulse races. You panic. You don’t know what to do. At best, you might know someone who can help set your blog back on its feet. At worst, you delete everything and try to start all over–losing 2-3 years worth of content.

Don’t be a dummy.

Look, even we writers need to have some bit of technical savvy about us. Blogging is huge, and just about every writer I know has their own blog these days. If you’re going to be a blogging writer, then you need to be smart about it.

Backup your files and database(s) regularly.

If you are using a self-hosted blog (one on your own domain) you need to know how to do this. Word Press, one of the more popular blogging platforms, has some handy plug-ins that will simplify this process for you. The best plugin I’ve found is WP-DB-Backup. After you install this plugin and activate it, you can either download backups as desired, or set up automatic backups at intervals. The best thing about this plugin (in my opinion) is that it will email you the backups in a zipped file once completed. It’s an automatic process that you don’t have to even think about.

Think you’re not smart enough to do it alone?

You might not know how to backup your website, but that’s no excuse. All it takes is one hacked file or corrupted database and you’ll lose your entire blog forever, if you aren’t prepared.

If you don’t think you can learn how to manage your website on your own, or you don’t have the time, or you just don’t want to have to deal with it, then hire someone to do it for you. The cost of ensuring your website’s safety and stability is a small price to pay, in exchange for the peace of knowing that all your written content is safe.

About Hope

Hope Wilbanks is a writer who had to learn the hard way about backing up every website managed by a blogging system. You can read some of Hope’s self-improvement articles at http://www.nurturedsoul.com.