You’ve heard that. You know it’s true. You may even have done it, or at least think you have done it. This has become an especially important topic for those of us who have a WordPress blog (such as this) or a personally maintained photo gallery, such as Gallery2.

It seems the first thing that’s emphasized is the importance of backing up the system’s database. Most packages provide specific instructions for doing that. If you have done that you figure you’re done. After all your blog or gallery is the same thing in your mind as the database. The trick here is that the database is a particular thing used by web systems to enable them to function. It’s not your data — your content — it’s data about your data. After you have backed it up you still have not completely backed up your blog or gallery.

Your blog or gallery consists of three things:

• the content (the wise words in your blog or the great shots in your gallery)
• the program package that tells it how to work,  and
• the database that describes its structure so it will work

The entire system resides on a web server somewhere. To back up the database you follow instructions explaining how to use mySQL to back it up and download it to your computer where you store it somewhere safe. Now, if anything happens to the system as it resides on the far away web server you would have a copy that can be used to restore the database, but you cannot necessarily “rescue” the programs nor your content.

To backup the programs and your content that are on the web server you need a FTP capability — a package such as FileZilla — to download them to your computer where you can store them.

There is one further consideration about backups that goes beyond what is needed to backup a blog or a photo gallery. What about any files that are stored on your computer that you do not want to lose?  Have you backed them up onto something that is stored away from where your computer is,  so they will be safe in the case something happens to your computer or its location?

In the “old days” we did not have many of these files so we could store them on floppy disks or later on CDs. They didn’t take up much room and we could keep them at some other location we felt was secure. Now there are many more files and they have become quite large. Furthermore we’d like to back them up frequently and immediately move the backups “off site.” Two packages that can be used to accomplish this are Mozy and the new S3SystemBackup. One final decision you will need to make if you decide to use such a package is whether and how much to backup backups you have stored on your computer of your blog or your photo gallery.