What Is CodeGuard? How Does CodeGuard Backup Work?
Automatic website backups refer to backups that run automatically, without any human interference. The need for automatic backups is on a rise as manual backups can be insufficient, especially for websites that store a lot of personal information of their users (eCommerce) or that process a lot of data at any given point of time (high-traffic websites). With manual backups, if you don’t have a recent copy of your website, a data loss may lead to your website being out of date when it’s eventually restored.
Thus, manual backups, although necessary, are inadequate. An effective and comprehensive backup strategy entails the combination of manual and automatic backups. With automatic backup applications, the routine and management of creating, maintaining, and storing backups are taken off your hands. You install the application, set it up, and let the software do everything for you.
What is CodeGuard?
CodeGuard Website Backup is one of the leading automatic website backup software. CodeGuard automates the backup process and ensures that all your website data is backed up without any manual intervention from your end. If you were to lose your website data, you can use the latest backup that CodeGuard would have already created.
How Does CodeGuard Work?
- Initial Backup: Once you install CodeGuard, it creates something called an ‘Initial Backup’. This is the application’s first backup of your website. During the initial backup, CodeGuard verifies your credentials, it analyzes the file structure of your website, creates a git repository, encrypts the data and finally moves it to a server. At this point, there’s a backup of your website with CodeGuard.
- Daily Tracking and Backup: Once this stage is complete, CodeGuard begins tracking your website daily. It compares the website to the copy that it has stored. Whenever it detects a change, it implements those changes to the backup copy as well. The most important advantage of having CodeGuard is this daily tracking service.
Daily tracking is important because, irrespective of when you lose data, the previous day’s backup is available. This enables you to restore the latest working version of your website after recovery. - On-Demand Backup: In higher plans, CodeGuard offers one more service called ‘On-Demand Backup’. As the name suggests, it’s a feature where you can create a backup whenever you want. You don’t have to wait for the daily tracking by the application.
On-Demand backups are useful if you’ve just made some significant changes to your website and want that to be instantly backed up.
Advantages of CodeGuard
- Automated Efficiency
This is, by far, the most important advantage that CodeGuard offers. The only time you need to interact with it is when you first install the program and add your website to it. Once that’s done, CodeGuard automates the entire process, and you don’t need to interfere in any way.
You can also stop worrying about backups. It’ll create backups, store them, and delete them automatically. CodeGuard stores a backup for 90 days before deleting a copy. If you don’t want CodeGuard to delete files after 90 days, you can change that in the settings menu.
2. Safety
All the data that CodeGuard saves is on Amazon Web Service’s S3 offering. That’s Amazon Simple Storage Service. Because it’s all on AWS S3, all the customer data (including your website data) is encrypted using the AES-256 bit key. What’s more, all this data is made redundant by storing it in multiple places across different facilities. This means that you don’t have to worry about data breaches or theft of data.
3. Daily tracking
This is a feature that sets CodeGuard apart from other services. CodeGuard, irrespective of your plan, will track your website every day and whenever there’s a change, it’ll save it. As mentioned earlier, this means that you always have access to the latest version of your website.
Additionally, all these files are date and time-stamped, which allows you to use an older copy if need be. In case you do want to monitor what’s happening CodeGuard also ships an easy-to-use dashboard from which you can monitor and control everything.
4. Cost-Effective
CodeGuard is a paid application. You need to buy a plan, based on your specific requirements. However, CodeGuard is inexpensive when you consider the alternative. If you were to maintain a backup within your company, the costing would be quite high. First off, you’d have to invest on the hardware that you’d need.
Second, you’d have to create backups on your own periodically. Also, you might end up paying someone to do all this for you if you don’t have the necessary expertise in house. Finally, it also takes a lot of time. With CodeGuard, you save on all these costs. And to top it all off, you don’t have to worry about your backups at all, as CodeGuard takes care of everything, from taking the backup to storing it.
Conclusion
Automated backup solutions are here to stay. In fact, many companies and businesses are automating all their backup solutions. CodeGuard is at the forefront of that changing landscape. When you consider the fact that everything is automated, there’s daily tracking, excellent record keeping, safe storage and maintenance of data, and a nominal price for all these services, CodeGuard starts to look like a bit of a no-brainer.
That’s the reason why leading hosting providers have started to offer it with their web hosting packages. This way, not only do you get great hosting services, but you’ll also get impeccable backup services. Best of both worlds, if you think about it.
