An interesting back up plan
So over the long holiday I basically got screwed by a hosting company I use for some smaller sites that I do some SEO work for. The first mistake I made was staying with this company after the got hacked. None of my sites were on this host, but some smaller ones that don’t (and will never) receive a ton of traffic were.
I was under no obligation (other then being an ethical person with a heart) to help them get their sites back up (plus the fact that all of my SEO work would be down the drain if I did not fix it ASAP). That was the main problem though. Getting the sites back up, because there was no “back up” of the sites anywhere and the host was flat out not helping and not returning calls and just being an ass.
One of my clients was really freaked out because she was not sure how she was going to ever be able to come up with all of the great content again for her site. I was thinking and thinking about what could be done and if I had ever saved anything etc. I had not. Then it hit me. THE WAY BACK MACHINE from Archive.org
The way back machine is a pretty cool (and powerful) website that archives most of the websites out there and they do it from the “birth” (or close to it) of the site. It is pretty up to date as well, because when I went to look up the site in question it was completely archived and only two months old. The good news and the point of this blog is the main thing this client of mine needed was her content. All of her content was there on Archive.org and we were saved.  It took alot of work creating a new site, navigation etc.. but in as little as a night and a morning her entire site was back up and live. I am pretty sure it was quick enough to not get dinged to bad by the engines either.
I will have to do some 301’s and some tweaking here and there, but a major disaster was avoided because of Archive.org
I used it for saving the life of a website, but its pretty cool to just go and see what websites used to look like and play around. Don’t waste to much time like I have though.
Has anyone ever used Archive.org for the same reasons I have, or have you used it only for amusement? Also let this post be a good lesson for anyone that owns a website to back the entire thing up, and back it up often!
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If your host gives you access to cron you can setup an automagic backup script to archive everything for you. cron is basically a timer that will do what you tell it at a certain time.
I do my own hosting and every 24hrs cron archives all .html type files and backs up all databases. It’s like my own personal archive.org. I can find *anything* from any of my sites with daily snapshots.