Whether online or offline, data is a very important thing to all businesses. Losing the data stored in your server can harm your business, making you spend large amounts of time and money to recover or replace them.

Replacing the data, though, is not that easy with some critical applications. In order to avoid all this you should find ways for retaining your data. This is what data back-up does. You save your important data either to a remote server or another media. If and when you need it, you can use the data to restore it back. Corrupt applications, corrupt data files, natural disasters, intentional damage and hardware failures are among the situations that can make you lose data. In such cases, you can restore the data by using that which you backed up on the remote server. In order not to lose much data when a situation like those above-mentioned occurs, you should perform periodical back-ups.

Data backup is not just common, but also necessary in web hosting industry. Because of the increasing number of viruses or worms, it is possible that you don’t even notice that you have lost data. Considering everything, always take a backup of your data. You will usually receive a comprehensive data backup scheme when purchasing a web hosting account. If you have a site with many users, you should also backup their data, but separately from the site’s data, so you can restore whichever you want.

 There are two types of backup: incremental or full backup. The former implies taking a backup only of the data that has changed since the last backup, while the latter means taking a backup of all the site’s data. Taking a full backup generally take a lot of time and space, which can be saved by taking backups in the tar format or the .gz format.

 The backup plan provided by most web hosting services can be monthly, weekly, on a daily basis or even hourly, depending on how critical your data is. You may be charged for this service by the hosting provider. You can also schedule the backup yourself, if the web hosting services provides you with the necessary tools. The backed up data is stored online on a secure server or even off line on your computer.

 In the web hosting industry, it is very important to take backups of your data and your site. In case of any contingency, you can restore the website in no time.

Click here to change this text.