Did you see my post entitled, “Back Up Your Data.” I am bringing it up again, in such short return, because you seriously need to back up your data. When I began penning this post, and the previous “Back Up Your Data”, I had the former scheduled to publish on Valentine’s Day, almost immediately after my “Troubleshooting 101” post. And then there was the rare hardware failure, and my website was down.

So let me admit something… Guess what data I have failed to backup for embarrassingly too long? My website. And, due to a power supply failure, around 11am on Valentine’s Day, my website went kablooey. That’s right, my website. Instead of waiting for the data to port, as I was anxious about an outage when I had just referred people to my site, I asked my service provider to switch servers. (Ironically, it was about the same time the existing server finally came back online.) My contact at my hosting provider started moving things over, and she noted there as some problem with my databases. I could access all my files, I saw them, but they were not showing up the way they should. Sometimes these things just take time, especially if you opt to move from one server to another… I could have been patient and waited. I could have had a backup. I could have…

While the “could’ve, would’ve, should’ve” game is rarely effective, I do like to pause here and reflect on how I, preaching about back ups, had karma come give me a great big kiss about backing up my data. Seriously, back up your data.

So, did you read the post about backing up your data? Are you reading this now? Are you convinced yet of the need to back up your data? I sure hope so! Take a queue from me, and back it up so you don’t lose it.