A lot of people have just had a stark reminder of the importance of up-to-date backups.
This month website hosting company 123 Reg suffered a hardware failure on one of its servers. This led to some of its customers’ websites either being lost entirely, partially lost, or restored to an old version dating back to August 2017.
As you can imagine, users were left in a state of anger and confusion. 123 Reg, which calls itself the UK’s “number one website provider”, took a while to let customers know when a normal service would resume and when (if ever) they’d have their websites back online.
This chaotic situation has hit numerous individuals as well as businesses, making them look unprofessional and causing them to lose customer trust and money. It’s presumably up to individual users to ensure that they have backups.
Such little catastrophises are rare, but by no means unheard of. However their UpdraftPlus users who’d set regular backups were safe: instead of panicking, losing out or having to make do with an old, out-dated version of their website, they would be able to restore everything with a click of a few buttons.
So spread the word: everyone with a website should have insurance – in this online world, plagued as much by incompetence and error as by malicious cybercrime, having backups makes perfect sense.
