There’s just nothing like that “where’s my DATABASE???” panicked feeling.

Yep, I had to deal with that today. It was a problem with the host, and several of my sites had no access to their databases this morning for about two hours.

Talk about a miserable feeling. Fortunately, most were pretty young sites with minimal traffic to lose, but that doesn’t make it much more fun. Nothing lost in the end, though, and now they’re all back online.

It did serve as a reminder, though, and I just finished doing backups of all my databases. I’d hate to lose them for real, after all. It’s one of those things that needs to be on my monthly calendar at the very least, if not weekly, but somehow keeps sliding off the chart. At least today’s reminder was a gentle tap, rather than the sledgehammer of finding the data all gone.

Backing up databases, if you use them, should be a routine thing you do. Just pick a date.

You probably have databases that need backing up if you have a forum, Wordpress or other blogging software installed on your site, a content management system, or a variety of other programs you use to run your site that keep track of things for you.

Backing up your database shouldn’t be too hard. There’s a plugin that makes it very easy for Wordpress; otherwise you need to go to your control panel and see if you have phpMyAdmin available to you. If that isn’t available, find out from your host how you can backup your databases. Any good host will have a way for you to manage your databases. It should just be a couple where you export your database, then a click to prepare and save it.

I generally keep a few backups of each site in case one turns out to be corrupted. Sheer paranoia on my part, I’m sure. But I would far rather be certain of what I’m doing than to get it entirely wrong.

Yes, most hosts do at least theoretically save backups for you. However, some will charge you to put in the backups, and others just don’t do that good a job of it. I’d rather trust my own work. If my host can put it back for me, great! Less work for me. But in case they had so major a problem that they lose the backups too, I don’t want to suffer the consequences.

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