Displaying items by tag: Akeeba Backup

One of the most important and often neglected aspects of managing a site is taking frequent backups. Backups can save your site in the unfortunate event that it crashes unexpectedly.

Ranging from a component upgrade gone wrong and a simple human error to hacking attempts, sites do crash all the time.

The best time to back it up is yesterday.

This is a guest post by Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos, lead developer of Akeeba Backup.

As you might have noticed, my blog was unavailable on and off for about 36 hours a few days ago. Obviously, this is not something I'm happy about.

The reason for the down-time seemed to be some trouble with the mySQL server. It just didn't want to start. I tried everything I knew, then contacted my hosting company. They told me to restart the mysqld service (done). They then told me to reboot the server (done). After several more emails from me, describing the problem, I didn't hear anything.

Come the next day, I sent some more emails to the hosting company. Still no response. Around 1 pm, I called them. As it turns out, some other server in their hosting environment had been hacked and they'd been working on that one first... Doh! It took the support tech 2 mins to determine my disk was full!

Last week, I published a post about my hard disk crash and backup problems. This is definitely not something I would wish on others.

Even though the hard disk was not recoverable (without a spending a LOT of cash), I was rather lucky. With emphazis on lucky! There was not too much information lost and I've been able to recover from the crash with minor real damage. It could have been a lot worse!

This week, I would like to focus on backup - what you can do to secure yourself from losing your Joomla web site.