The HostBaby Blog

Years ago a student burst into my office brandishing a floppy disk and blurting out, “I lost my whole thesis off this disk and it is due this Monday!!!” I asked, “did you make a backup?” and he answered, “uh…no…I’ve never needed one until now!” I could only imagine someone with a flat tire on the interstate saying, “well, I’ve never needed a spare tire until now!”

Regardless of the cause, data loss is inevitable. The best protection is to make backups of any data you would prefer not to lose. This article explains how to back up your web site content, your email, and contacts.

Backing up your website

It’s a good idea to back up your website once a year or before you are about to make any significant changes to your content or design. It is also critical to back up your site if you are transitioning from one hosting company to another.

If you host your site with HostBaby, daily backups are made of your site. However, if you want more control over when and what is backed up and how long that backup is saved, you can make and save your own backups.

If you have a HostBaby full website, backing it up is very simple. Just use FTP to download the entire contents to your local Mac or PC. Once there, you can opt to copy it to a CD or some removable media (e.g. USB Thumb Drive, etc.). Be sure to label it with the current date.

If you have a HostBaby Wizard account, there are a couple of manual backup/restore techniques you can use. They are outlined here.

Backing Up your Webmail Addressbook

If you access your HostBaby email through a local client (e.g. Mac Mail, Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.), you can back up your address book within your program. Refer to your help files or use your favorite search engine for instructions how to do this.

If, however, you access your email strictly through Webmail, you will want to back up your email addresses for safe-keeping. It’s pretty easy to do. Here is a help file explaining how.

Backing up your Webmail messages

Again, if you access your HostBaby email through a local client (e.g. Mac Mail, Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.), you can back up your email messages within your program. Refer to your help files or use your favorite search engine for instructions how to do this.

If you only access your email through webmail, you can easily back up your messages either by setting up an email client which will download copies of your messages to your Mac or PC. If you want to back up individual messages, you can use the webmail Archive feature. Both methods are described here.