Well I must say its hard to get out of the summer lazy atmosphere. The weather down here in Mexico is basically the best in the world. We are in our rainy season so it’s nice and cool, mostly the rain occurs at night so we still get sunny days.

In any event I wanted to talk about the importance of having backups. Host Gator gets too big thumbs up. It seems they do a backup of their servers every Sunday which is a godsend for people like myself who don′t bother doing backups. On Monday/Tuesday some of you may have noticed that the site was totally down, will not down per say, just missing a ton of files so basically inoperable.

You see the problem was I was in FTP and wanted to delete a file folder, so I just deleted the whole folder. About 10 seconds after I did this I realized the selected folder was the base folder for this word press blog. Not knowing how to stop the delete I closed my FTP. As I had done many modifications to the wordpress files I knew reloading wordpress would delete a lot of information and formatting. So basically I had a catastrophic problem on my hands and the only saving grace was the database was intact.

So not knowing really what to do I decided to call Host Gator. I explained my horrifying blunder and was told no problem I could fill in the simple online form and they would restore the web site in 12-24 hours. Now there is a nominal fee of $15 for the service but it actually saved me God knows how many hours of restoring files by hand. Now as I am Canadian and did in fact learn the habit of watching the pennies I will start doing backups every week so that if I error again I can do the restore myself and save $15.

I was very fortunate as Host Gator does backups. Does your provider do that? If not do you do backups?