Backup your Dreamweaver website as you go

Hi my name is Dan and in this video were going to look at backing up your website now this is caveman backing up your website were just going to literally copy and paste a version onto your hard drive just so that later on if you make a mistake you can go back to it. Automated website backup is 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 then I go and find out where I'm hosting it and my ones on where ever I’ve got my local folder and my one is on my hard drive so I’m going to go find it here and its 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 Ive got a version of it. And then I rename it and I’m going to call this one back up and I put the date backwards, so its 16th its February and the date is the 4th. The reason I put it backwards is that 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 5th. It just means that they stack alpha numerically so it means that the latest one is always at the bottom. So I just keep it in often a fled called zold and I just stick them in there and they’re just manual back ups. Before I start working every day on the project I back it up incase I have to go back. Its called zold with a z just so the z stacks at the bottom as well.

So it’s out of the way there. You’ll see some of the other sites that I work on, here is there’s my zold. And you’ll see there’s quite a few backups in here. 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 spaces. So that 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 up, in addition to backing up onto your hard drive, what you should do is make sure that your hard drive is backed up as well because its all fine and well if your websites backed up but then if you destroy your laptop or it gets stolen all your backups are gone as well. So I have two methods, I have a hard drive that I plug into my laptop and that backs up automatically. On a mac its pretty easy, something called time machine. There’ll be something similar for a pc as well.

The other thing that I do because I’m super scared of losing everything is I have an online back up as well, so every night I’ve got a bit of software, this one here is particularly cool, its called mozy. And literally every night you can see it just backs up a whole bunch of files for me. So I’ve set it to go at about 2am 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 mozy website, its all stored up there. I know that apple have a system called iCloud that they use as well, I’m using mozy because I used it from an old oc that I used. Check, there’s bound to be a better one or cheaper one to do that’s a paid service. But it just means there backed up online. Now if you want to get serious about website back up.