As owners of websites, one of the more important things you should do is to regularly backup the website. Most web hosting providers will enable daily or weekly backups, mainly for their disaster recovery purpose only. If you want to personally oversee a backup of your website, you can do it by yourself using the Backup function in hosting control panels like cPanel, Plesk and DirectAdmin. As a webmaster or domain owner, you are responsible for this task.
A good backup should have following criteria:
- Backup your data as frequently as possible.
- Give higher priority to critical data like database and web contents. Try to exclude temporary files.
- Your backup should NOT be saved inside the same server.
- Your backup should be retrievable and accessible anytime, anywhere.
- You should get notified for every backup status which has been scheduled.
- Your backup should be compressed, if disk space or bandwidth is your concern.
It is good if you can have your one FTP server to store backup remotely. But, what if the FTP server is down? How can we automate the backup task with limited access to the server? How can you be sure that the availability is always there? Cloud storage is your answer.
Cloud storage is becoming the best way to store files. Popular providers like Amazon S3, Dropbox, iCloud and Box.net are offering these facilities for free with some limitations. But, none of them are supporting FTP as the medium to transfer while almost all of webhosting providers only allow this transfer method.
