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.

Spring is here, at least in my part of the world. When living in a country with 5-6 months of winter and snow, you really appreciate the spring arriving! This winter has been a long one, and we've had snow since October! Fortunately, the snow is now mostly gone (where I live) and we're starting to see nature waking up again.

As always, when the snow disappears, it reveals the sins of the months past. It's time for a spring cleaning. Leaves, dust, things left in the snow during the winter and more will be swept away. Trees will be trimmed and houses cleaned. The city will again look its best. There's no doubt we need a spring cleaning in our houses and cities.

But how about your Joomla site? The spring is an excellent time to look at your site and determine if there's a need for a thorough cleaning there as well. My guess is it's long overdue ;)

In this post, I suggest some things you can do to clean up your Joomla site.

Working with Joomla on a regular basis, you will inevitably develop some habits. And, most likely, some of these habits are good, others are bad.

But there are some habits common for successful Joomla users.

Read on for seven good habits for working successfully with Joomla. This list of habits will improve your experience with Joomla, and save you from hours of cleaning up after a mishap.

Not so long ago, someone left a negative comment on this blog. The comment was more negative than others and directed towards a Joomla template developer. The commenter had experienced trouble with his Joomla website and needed to place the blame.

Criticism is OK, but negativity and the language used was not something I care for on my blog. So I didn't publish it.

Nevertheless, it got me thinking about the reason for the negative comment. Was the template developer to blame, or was it the user himself?

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.