Hi, my name is Dan, and in this video we're gonna look at  backing up your website. Now this is caveman backing up your website. We're just gonna literally copy  and paste a version, um, uh, onto your hard drive just so  that later on if you make a mistake, you can go back to it. Um, automated website backup is a surprisingly  harder than it should be. So whenever I work on a website  before I start working,  what I do is I make sure everything is closed and saved. Okay?

Then I go and find out wherever I'm hosting it  and my one's on, um, wherever I've got my local folder  and my one is on my hard drive. So I'm gonna go find it here  and it's on my desktop and there it is there. Here's where I'm keeping it. So what I do is I copy and I paste it. So I've got a version of it, and then I rename it  and I'm gonna call this one, uh, back up. And I put the date backwards.

So the, uh, it's the 16th, uh, it's uh, February,  and the date is the fourth. The reason I put it backwards is that, um,  tomorrow when I come along, I can copy and paste it  and do the exact same thing. I can go back up and I can put 16th,  but today is the fifth. Okay? And it just means that they stack  alpha, uh, alpha numerically. So it means that the latest one is always on the  bottom, okay?

So I just keep it in often a folder called Z  and I just stick them in there  and they're just kind of manual backups. Before I start working every day on the project,  I back it up in case I have to go back. So it's called Z with a Z, just so  that the Z stacks at the bottom as well. Okay? So it's kind of out of the way there. Um, you'll see say some of the other sites  that I work on here is, there's my old,  and you'll see, um,  there's quite a few backups in here, okay?

The different dates over the last year,  and there's the years in front of this one that I had  to copy off my hard drive to clear up space. Okay? So that's just a manual backup. It just means that if it all goes horribly wrong,  you can go back to a day to see where it went wrong  and maybe reinstall those files or copy  and paste that code back out. In addition to backing up onto your hard drive. Um, what you should do is make sure  that your hard drive is backed up as well,  because it's all fine and well if your website's backed up,  but then if you destroy your laptop  or it gets stolen, um, all your backups have gone as well.

So I have two methods. I have a hard drive that I plug into my laptop, um,  and that, um, backs up automatically on a max, pretty easy,  something called Time machine. And there'll be something similar for a PC as well. And the other thing that I do,  'cause I'm super scared of losing everything,  is I have an online backup as well. So every night I've got a bit of software. This one here is particularly called,  this one here is called Mozy.

Do. Uh, yeah, it's called m mo ZY. And literally every night you can see it just, um,  backs up a whole bunch of files for me. Um, so, um, I've set it to go at about 2:00 AM  eventually when I finish working,  and it just means it trickles up. And if my laptop gets stolen, I can then  download it again from the Mosey website. It's all kinda stored up there.

I know that Apple have a, um, a system called iCloud  that they use as well. I'm using Mosey 'cause I used it from a old PC that I used. Um, uh, check. There's, there's bound to be, um, probably a better one  or a cheaper one to do that's a paid service. But yeah, it just means they're backed up online. Now, if you wanna get serious about website, um, backup  or say, um, getting into things like version control.

So say there is a couple of people working on a website  and you wanna make sure that, um,  John is not wrecking the site 'cause he's new  and he doesn't know what he's doing and he's updating code  and you want to kind of keep tracks  track of how things are going. There's a service called, um,  GitHub's is probably the most common at the moment. The only problem with GitHub is that it's,  it's really technical to get set up  and quite hard to manage. Um, I don't work on a site that's big enough  to warrant using GitHub, um,  but I know a lot of people that do. And, uh, it looks like this. Um, here it is github.com  and, um, there's competitors to GitHub as well.

So have a look at them, one and see which ones work for you. Um, but GitHub is probably the most popular  for online version control. The other thing you can do is check if your hosting account  does, um, do it automatically. Most don't, um, but some of them do,  but some of them you need to enable. Okay? So go into your hosting account, say it's with GoDaddy  and log in and see if they, I know GoDaddy doesn't.

Um, so check out your hosting. Maybe you're with 1, 2, 3 hosting or something else. Check if they have an online backup. Quite often what it does is it makes a duplicate zip copy  of your whole website and just sticks it into a folder. Okay? And then you can maybe download those periodically  just to make sure you've got a copy of it.

Okay? That's how to, uh, do some caveman backing up  of your website just in case.