Website backups are a very important part of doing business. Because website owners typically have hundreds of tasks to complete, those that seem less important often get shoved to the back burner. Unfortunately, website backups are one of these things. Many website owners don’t realize just how important they are. Site backups are the one thing you never want to put off in the grand scheme of things.

The chances of you needing your backup are slim, but this doesn’t mean that you won’t ever need that backup, and when you need it, you need it in a very bad way!

On top of backing your site up, you must also test that backup. Nothing is worse than needing that backup only to discover that the backup actually failed. Backing up a site, and testing the backup does not have to be hard. It just requires a little thought and planning, and it can be greatly automated as well.

If you perform a site backup, and it appears that everything went okay, don’t trust that. Make sure that you test the backup! This is rule number one when it comes to site backups.

Many Web Hosting companies offer backup services. These services will do full backups or incremental backups. An incremental backup just saves what has been added or changed since the last backup. A full backup backs up everything. Really think about what constitutes a full backup. If there was software available for your use on the server when you first started your website, but you had to make configuration changes, this needs to be backed up. In the event of a site failure and data loss, the Web Host could easily replace the original software, but your original configurations won’t be there, and you will have to start from scratch. For safety’s sake, PLEASE back up everything. I can’t stress this point enough.

Other things that should be backed up include software that you have purchased, as well as any mailing lists that you have built. These are vital. Losing things like this can easily and quickly put you completely out of business.

With most site backup software, you can choose which files will be backed up, and which ones will not. Obviously, the more files there are to backup, the longer the process takes. Because every aspect of your site is so vitally important to you and your business, for best results, make sure that you choose to backup everything – regardless of how long it takes.

Luckily, once the software starts its backup process, nothing else is required from you, except testing. For this reason, it really doesn’t matter how long the website backups process takes, and once you’ve set up your software to perform the backup, each subsequent backup can only get easier.