Blogging Tip #12-Back Up

I can’t believe that I haven’t put this in the Blogging Tips before this. It probably should be #1 for any Blogger, Website owner or Web Masters of any sort.

I am SO Happy I took by own advice on this one.

 Just in case you missed the post this morning (and most of you probably did) my Web Page was Hacked last night. Everything that I had on the Main .com page was gone. If people couldn’t get there, they couldn’t access any of the other 5 pages on the site either unless they went directly to a particular page.

It seems that the Hacker more than likely hacked in through the Old Forum using a script on phpBB which is not the most secure program in the world. (MazaGi let me know if that’s how you did it) Since it has been closed for quite some time, I just uninstalled it and thought that would be the solution.

At the time, I could access the Blogs and I thought I had just the one problem.

When I called BlueHost, they said they would fix it and the site would be back up in less than an hour. However, when I tried to sign in to the Blog, I got an error that my DataBase was Outdated. I tried to log in to the other Blogs I run and got the same error.

The guy from the help desk Restored the DataBase using an Old File from February! Since he restored the Whole DataBase which includes everything from the Webpage and ALL the Blogs, All the Content and Comments, php files, Theme and anything else you can think of, I lost Everything Between Mid-February and Today.

You know I called right back and gave them a piece of my mind. Once I settled down a little, we found a more recent DataBase back-up from April 5th on the server. That’s the last time I did a total back-up to that system, but luckily I did another back-up of all the Blogs yesterday that I downloaded to My Computer.

Boy, am I glad I did.

The only thing I ended up losing was what I had written this morning for this blog and a few updates I did last night to the Webpage.

There are 2 Morals to this story:

1. If you use phpBB for anything, be aware that it is not the most secure program and hackers can use a script to find a password for Administration Functions. Most phpBB platforms just default to your Main Access Password for your domain.

2. Back Up Everything. Do it as often as you feel is necessary, but Just DO IT. You won’t be sorry when the need arises. Believe me.

[tags]backing up,hacking,hackers,recovery[/tags]