Don’t forget to back up your sites!
Today one of our message boards was hacked. We are running phpBB2 and apparently there is a security hole in our version as this has happened before. (I should be fixing the problem instead of writing this message but it this is easier and less annoying.) We will probably have to upgrade to a current version and hope it is less vulnerable.
BUT, the good news is that we have a backup of the database from last week. If we need to we can just revert to that and we will be back in business. We will lose a few day’s worth of posts but I can live with that.
My advice regarding backups is: Back up, Back up, Back up! I back up our sites and databases and also the data on my hard drive as often as I can stand it. Actually backing up the sites and databases is a big job so I gave that to my assistant. For him it is not mere drudgery and so he does it much more regularly than I used to.
So it is boring and tedious, yes, but sooner or later it will save you and you know that. Even a backup that is 6 months old can be a big help.
Where possible, keep multiple copies on your server, your hard drive and burned to CDs or tapes which should be located in a different location if possible. That gives you multiple places to recover from, some more convenient than others. And it increases your chances of having something, somewhere when you need it.
One more thing — make sure you are really getting everything when you do your backups. We recently recovered from backup for another phpBB2 board that was hacked (see a pattern here?) but we had several serious bugs in our backup script and it turned out our best backup was over 6 months old. Yikes! Our boards are not critical, but if you have something that is you should make sure you can actually recover from the backups you are making.
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