About mass or bulk email marketing strategies and backup

if you don't make your own backup
you are taking the chance that you could
loose all of your work ... forever.

Disaster Recovery - The Beginning
Disaster Recovery - Laying the Ground Work
Disaster Recovery - Convincing the Boss
Disaster Recovery - Prepare for Disaster

Internet Tips And Secrets
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Prepare For Disaster

Imagine the following nightmare: you've worked hard on your site for months, tweaking it until it looks perfect. You've got great content, excellent graphics and a wonderful design.

Thousands of visitors are pouring in every day, and you are getting dozens of guestbook entries all telling you how wonderful you've done and hundreds of emails praising your good work.

One day you go to access your site and you get an error. Your site does not respond. You feel a little annoyed and try again a few minutes later ... your browser still times out. This goes on for hours and then for a full day. You feel panic rising in your gorge and your chest tightens up. You haven't slept and your wife is getting worried.

You've tried over and over to call your host's support number and it does not pick up. Their website doesn't show any problems ... it's a weekend so they are all at home watching the game.

Monday comes and you finally get an automated response to one of your panicky emails. Your host

has had a hard disk crash and didn't have a backup ...
or they didn't have any money and closed their doors ...
or a hacker attacked their site and wiped out all of the files
or your made a mistake with FTP and accidentally deleted all your work
or the host got hit by the dreaded xyz virus ...
or "fill in the blank"

And you didn't have a backup of your site.

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I have even read report about one user who had over a gigabyte on his website of years of hard work with no backup of his own. His host decided he was getting too much traffic and simply deleted his site.

The poor guy and to send a note to everyone on his email list begging people to check their browser cache's to see if they could send him the graphics and pages ... it took six months but he rebuilt his site (and now he has a backup).

The moral of the story ... backup your web site. I don't care whether you've got it on Homestead, AOL or Addr.com, if you don't make your own backup you are taking the chance that you could loose all of your work ... forever.

How do you back up your site? What I do is make sure that I edit my site on my OWN hard drive, then upload it as I make changes. That way I always have my own copy (and, of course, I make a backup of that also). If you don't or can't do that, then just use FTP to copy the files to your own hard drive once in a while.

If you have no other choice, you can use the "Save As..." functions to save the graphics and HTML pages. Note that if you do this you will capture your sites banners also so this is not the preferred method.

So backup your site. You will be glad that you did

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Disaster Strikes!

Not having a good backup can be a disaster of epic proportions. In one instance I've seen the lack of a backup turn a situation which was uncomfortable into a complete disaster.

I knew a guy who was working on an older Macintosh computer. Our entire company switched to PCs except for him, because he didn't have the time.

The Macintosh was old and unbeknownst to anyone it had been outfitted with an old RAID drive (mirrored) from a manufacturer that no longer existed.

This guy believed he was doing backups every day. Someone showed him how to do it and he followed those instructions to the letter, even to the point of ignoring the error that it produced each and every time it ran. That was actually in the instructions.

One day his hard disk started making strange sounds so he called us. We tried to boot it up but no go. We asked him if he was doing backups and he handed us his zip disks, which were blank! He had been faithfully doing backups for over two years, and not one of them worked.

We had to send the disk out to a disk repair shop, and they managed to recover about 20% of the data at a cost of over $6,000! It took the poor guy almost six months with two temps to get all of the data hand-typed back into the computer!

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Copyright (c) 1999-2001,
Richard Lowe Jr And Claudia Arevalo-Lowe

Richard Lowe Jr. is the webmaster of Internet Tips And Secrets. This website includes over 1,000 free articles to improve your internet profits, enjoyment and knowledge. Learn how to create, promote and maintain an awesome website which not only attracts visitors but makes them want to come back. You can visit the web site at http://www.internet-tips.net subscribe to the weekly ezine at http://www.internet-tips.net/joinlist.htm and subscribe to daily tips by sending an email to internet-tips@getresponse.com

Claudia Arevalo-Lowe is the webmistress of Internet Tips And Secrets and Surviving Asthma. Visit her site at http://survivingasthma.com

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