Here’s a story from the IT press: Sony forgot to renew their domain name, sonyonline.net.
Not only that, but the renewal and expiry reminders were going to an email address that nobody was reading. Oops.
Eventual result: the domain name was suspended, and lots of game-connected activity stopped. And lots of Sony customers wondered how an entertainment behemoth could make such a basic blunder. The silliest thing is that domain registrars allow you to just tick one box to automate the renewal of your services… relying on seeing the manual invoices each year is completely unnecessary.
Life is full of mundane tasks which, when not done promptly, don’t bite us straight away. “I’ll do that tomorrow”. “I’ll check on that later, and there’s plenty of time.” But by the law of averages, that approach always bites us sometime. Sometimes the resulting problem is little (you get a reminder letter); sometimes it’s huge (you broadcast to thousands of customers that they can’t rely on you).
WordPress backups are one of those areas. You might not need a backup today. You might not need it tomorrow. So, it’s easy to put it on the “to do later, sometime” list. Big mistake: restoring your hacked or deleted WordPress site from a backup can take 5 minutes; rebuilding the entire site from scratch might take so long that you’ll have to close instead.
UpdraftPlus Premium contains a number of automation features: scheduled backups (from every4 hours up to every month), automatic deletion of your old backups so that your space doesn’t fill up (e.g. keep 30 backup sets and delete anything older), and automatic reporting (e.g. send you an email alert if the backup failed). And just in case Dropbox (etc.) is down on the day you really need your backups, you can send them to multiple locations.
Don’t wait until it’s too late – even Sony slip up when they try that.
David Anderson (founder, lead developer, UpdraftPlus)
