The Virtues of My Backup Addiction
We’ve been building websites for a long time. Like 13 years long.
I’ve always been a huge advocate of backups. While we’re presently on Dropbox, we’ve been on a variety of different services over the years, whatever is most convenient and affordable, really. And along the way, I’ve kept the folder for every project we’ve built.
We also built our own content management system, about 11 years ago, in what was then a rising star: Ruby on Rails. I swear it was still in prerelease when I made the site, and I’m not a great programmer so much of it was kind of hacked together. But not only did it work, but it’s still there. It still works. And it still claims to be in beta as well.
This week, a long-time client called because her website was gone. There was a snafu, and the whole thing vanished. The hosting company basically put up a “coming soon” page. Not good.
So the question came up: do we have a backup? A quick search on my phone revealed that indeed, we do have a backup, which has been sitting there, untouched, for 10 years. Just a bunch of PHP files and images.
We logged in to the host, uploaded the files, and voila. There was our site, exactly as it looked 10 years ago. Not bad. The problem is that most of the site’s copy was from 2005 or so. We hadn’t made a backup since then.
But our content management system had been doing its job. Ladybug was designed to work with really simple setups, like basic Flash and PHP sites, in an era before we had a CMS we were happy with.
This meant I could log in and see all her updates in there. And I could click a button to “re-publish” the site. All the XML files needed were pushed to the server, and it just worked. All the latest content was there, everything exactly as she had last updated it.
Sometimes I feel silly for the precautions I take. Sometimes I think it’s crazy how many backups of extremely-old projects I make. But when the inevitable finally happens, and a really cool nonprofit’s site vanishes, we are there.
Even if we built the site ten years ago, we’re able to bring it back. And it still works. Just like the day it launched.
Those are the days I’m really proud of my backup addiction.
