How To Backup And Restore Your Dating Site
You’d be surprised to find out how many people are not backing up their website. Some stats show that over 50% of single owner websites are not being backed up on a regular basis. In the event your server crashes, if you’re not backing up then you’ve lost everything. That’s a sad reality but it’s also one that can be easily corrected and all under $30 dollars a year.
Do I Need To Backup My Dating Site?
Of course you do. Your dating site is comprised of two parts. You have files and a database. You need to backup each one separately and daily.
Imagine that you’re running for a few months and you get hacked only to find out that you have no backups. All gone. All that data is gone. Imagine that your server crashed and you don’t have a backup. You’re done. You’re either folding up shop or starting back with nothing. If you think it doesn’t happen then I can tell you recently one of our customers who was hosting his own dating website for 2 years lost it all because he didn’t backup his site. 2 years of lost members is a hard pill to swallow. So back up your dating site!
A daily backup of files and databases can save you a lot of headaches down the road and it’s cheaper than you think.
How Much Does Backing Up Cost?
Believe it or not you can backup your dating site files and database for under $30 dollars a year. This is done via DropMySite.com. A great inexpensive tool that backups up your site every day if you wish and allows you to restore it if something was to go wrong.
They offer you 10GB of drive space and considering that the dating software only takes up 45MB then that gives you tons of room to grow. Need more space? You can get 30GB of space for only $79 dollars a year. That’s crazy awesome and effective.
Is your data worth $30 dollars? It’s a cheap price to pay for peace of mind and security.
How Does The Backup Work?
DropMySite works by uploading your database and files to their cloud storage servers. You can set up a daily backup and save up to 30 backups (Retention). That means if you have a disaster you can pick a backup to restore from via the previous 30 backups.
To backup your dating site you’ll need to setup a FTP account on your cpanel. You can exclude some folders but to ensure proper backups be sure to back up everything under the /public_html/ folder. That’s all of your dating site files.
This solution also backs up your databases. You can setup your database to be backed up every day on a 30 day retention also so you won’t have to worry about failures.
Steps To Restore Your Dating Site
If for some reason you need to restore you’re dating site you can do it a couple ways.
Manual Restore
The first way is to login to your DropMySite.com account and and from the dashboard click on Download Files. Then navigate to what you want to download then you’ll be able to choose the date then download the files. In most cases if you’re restoring a site then you want to download everything in /public_html/ and that will push a zip file to your computer.
Take that zip file of your dating site files and upload them to your file manager in your cpanel (in /public_html) and then unzip them. Be sure to delete the zip file from your file folder once you’re done unzipping it.
Next you’ll want to download your database so go to your DropMySite Dashboard and go to the database section (Below files) and click on Download and that will take you do the area where you click the date you want then Download. Take that database file and go to your MySQL area of your cpanel and click on PhyMyAdmin then select your database and then click on Import the database then select your file on your computer and then Go. This will restore your database from backup. That’s it, you’re back in business.
Automatic Restore
This method allows you to restore your files and your database all within the DropMySite Dashboard. You simply click the Restore button and choose your date and files that you want to restore then choose what you want to restore.
Once you have the date and the folder selected simply click the Restore Files button. This will automatically restore your file structure back to your website. Same thing for databases.
It takes a bit longer to do this for the files have to be transferred from DropMySite which can take some time because the files are restored one file at a time but it works and works well. While we do prefer the manual method you can still do it automatically.
What If My Whole Server Has Crashed?
In the event that your whole server has crashed and everything including the operating system, then your hosting company will need to restore the server operating system back. At that point you’ll need to re-setup your MySQL databases. They will be empty so just import them from your backup once you have them recreated.
If you need help doing this simply let us know. We’ll get your site restored in just a few minutes and this is a free service that we provide.
In Conclusion
It’s very important to backup your dating site every day. You don’t want to have a failure so backup your site every day and if you need help setting it up let us know. We want you to have good backups.