Life isn't fair. Bad things happen to good people. Everything that can go wrong, will. Most of us grew up with these cliches, and the reason every culture has its cliches is because there's usually more than a grain of truth in them. Every day there are earthquakes, hurricanes and floods, just as there are crashed hard drives, short-circuited motherboards and blown power supplies in the computers we all use. You can't prevent Mother Nature and Father Time from wreaking their damage when and how they will, but you can certainly protect yourself and make plans for your online business or other website to and survive to work another day.
Challenging digital environment
The web is a challenging environment for disaster recovery. Because location is irrelevant to speed-of-light electronics, environmental disasters in your own area may not affect your site that is hosted in another state. On the other hand, you can be running a business and think the day is going along nicely, when in fact a tornado took our your hosting provider in Omaha.
Your online business or site comprises three parts:
1. What you need for users to view and visit your website; 2. The tools required to maintain it; and 3. Everything required for future development of your site.
Backing up live operations
The first order of business is to understand everything having to do with the actual "live" operation of your site. This means hardware, the operating system, a network connection and all of the files, scripts and other content. If you have your own servers, you need a comprehensive plan for any kind of hardware failure. If you have a hosting package, you still need a plan, despite the fact that a good host will have backups and even move your site to a working server if yours fails.
Even with a good host, other problems can arise. Your provider's own hardware can fail, or the company can go bankrupt and turn off the servers unexpectedly. You need a plan for this possibility. Don't leave your business's future in anyone else's hands. Consider a "redundant" site, ready to go online from another host, or develop some other comprehensive strategy.
Tools and such
This list should start with the tools you need to both update and maintain your site. If you use a content management system, run custom scripts for automated tasks or have crontab entries that are important, get those together for backup. You will also need the software packages you use to put it all together. As far as your disaster recovery plan is concerned, these items are every bit as important as the actual files that make up your website.
Your site does not "run" on computer code alone. Many daily tasks require you to intervene manually to set up user accounts, moderate a forum or ship an order. These are not procedures you can either back up or automate, so you need some action items in your plan in case something prevents you from performing necessary manual steps. You will create this plan on your own, as it will necessarily be specific to your own site and business practices.
Special ingredients
There are also some "miscellaneous" things you need for future development of your site following a disaster and recovery. Your web log file can come in very handy, since your past will be a fairly good guide to your future. If your site is too large for full website logs to be practical, at least back up all your summary data. There is much more information in the logs, so don't settle for a summary unless you know what it is you are giving up and can manage without it.
In addition to the log files or summary, assemble all the other materials you used to develop your site. This can include computer files where you've noted your plans or procedures, and even various paper files about your business.
Media matters
There are number of options for backup media. A tape backup system can be expensive and complex to operate, but it is flexible. A DVD writer is inexpensive and simple to use, but somewhat more limited in scope. However, a standard DVD writer and a few automated scripts are an efficient, effective way of backing up your files. You should also go to the trouble of storing a full backup offsite, in case of a fire or other "total disaster" scenario.
A smart, well-thought-out disaster recovery plan will keep your website online and in business despite any unforeseen events that would otherwise obliterate your hard work. Your plan has to cover the past, present and future of your business, and you should review it regularly to ensure you have all the bases covered. This is your livelihood you're dealing with so don't take any shortcuts. Even if disaster does strike, you can make sure that you're a survivor-along with your site, your business and your income.Amy Armitage is the head of Business Development for Lunarpages. Lunarpages provides quality web hosting from their US-based hosting facility. They offer a wide-range of services from linux virtual private servers and managed solutions to shared and reseller hosting plans. Visit online for more information.
