Weekend Links: Backup, Backup, and Backup

Something happened this week that reaffirmed my decision last month to start taking backups seriously.

So, I was making a small edit to an old post on WordPress. As I clicked “Update”, the “Posts” section went blank and my Dashboard showed that I had zero posts.

Apparently, all pages on Realm of Prosperity had disappeared!

I have no idea what happened but I logged straight into my web hosting server and restored the most recent WordPress database backup. I am so fortunate to have built a solid backup system just for occurrences like this.

Everyone Needs Backups
As a blogger, amateur photographer, and self-taught web designer, I’d like to believe that my digital content is very important. With our immense reliance on technology nowadays, everyone has some vital documents and files that require multiple backups.

My inspiration came from a blog post by world class photographer Chase Jarvis on his photography workflow (the video is very educational). He stresses redundancy and off-site storage so I tried my best to have multiple backups in different places.

Sure, I am no professional but my website and files mean the world to me so I treat all my files as if it were part of a professional business.

My Backup Procedure

1. Using the WP-DB-Backup plugin, I schedule a daily backup to my Gmail account.
2. When that email hits my inbox, I also download a copy of that backup to the Dropbox folder on my Macbook Pro.
3. At the end of each day, I use Apple’s Time Machine software to backup my entire laptop to an external hard drive, which is rotated weekly with another external hard drive.

Therefore, I have 4 backups of my blog, 3 backups of all my work, and 2 backups of my entire hard drive. Dropbox is great off-site online backup medium. I put one of the external hard drives on the other side of the house to be on the safe side.

Is my backup configuration too much? No, I like sleeping at night knowing that if anything happened, I wouldn’t have lost much. Besides, the whole process takes 5 minutes of my day.

This may be handy advice to these bloggers who are pumping out such great posts:

• What’s Wrong with the Modern Personal Investing World at Redeeming Riches. Investing is considered essential to those who want to build wealth but there are many flaws in the system that makes it much tougher to achieve our financial goals.
• 3 Guerrilla Tactics to Get Rid of Clutter at 20 Something Finance. Accumulation of stuff is a prime evil that diverts focus and attention – leading to reduced productivity. I strive to keep my life simple with fewer things so these tactics would surely be useful.
• The Five Minute Rule at Bargaineering. Keeping your finances simple allows for more efficient money management. If something get to confusing for you to understand, then you probably shouldn’t delve any more into the matter – especially when it puts your money at risk.

A few carnival that Realm of Prosperity participated in:

• Carnival of Personal Finance – Getting’ Hot in Here Edition at NerdWallet
• Carnival of Financial Planning – Edition #151 at The Skilled Investor

(Photo credit: Sarabbit)