The Taxman Cometh Edition (April 2010)

NEW CLIENT: Kande Ngalamulume for U.S. Congress

"To remedy our current economic situation and to return our state to prosperity, we are going to need most, if not all, of our talented young people. Without decent and well-paying jobs, this goal simply cannot be realized. Change always begins at home; this truth has called me back home to be an agent of change. It is for this reason I am entering this race as a Democrat to represent Michigan’s 8th District in the United States Congress."

Brainwrap is providing the updates and maintenance for Mr. Ngalamulume's campaign website.

NEW CLIENT: Brandon School District

"Excellence in Education"

Brainwrap had little to do with the actual visual design of Brandon's new school district website, but was brought in to reorganize, restructure and generally clean up the code of the site, which was previously a shmorgishborg of different styles, coding techniques and layouts. This was particularly challenging due to the sheer size of the site--over 400 pages of content!

Featured Topic: Backup, Backup, Backup!!

I’ve been in business for over 10 years now, and in that time I’ve learned many lessons about this business—and about running a business in general. One of the most important ones, especially these days, is also one of the first: BACK UP YOUR DATA.

Unfortunately, last month I made a mistake that I don’t think I’ve done in years: I performed a significant update on a clients’ site without making sure to back up their data first.

Fortunately, it turned out that I did have a backup of the data in question—from over a year earlier. Thankfully, in this particular case, nothing had changed with that data over the course of the year, so I was able to restore it to the original state for the client seamlessly. Unfortunately, I lost almost a week’s worth of working time hunting down the solution.

I confess this incident to make two points: First, that even those of us “in the business” sometimes forget to back up our data—with potentially devastating results. Secondly, in case you haven’t gotten the point yet: BACK UP YOUR DATA.

There are any number of methods for this—external hard drives, USB thumbdrives, DVDs, or even online storage services. There’s also a bevy of software solutions which can streamline and automate this process for you, regardless of which operating system or platform you’re using.

My own preferred methodology is:

• NIGHTLY: An software script (I use a Mac-specific solution called Déjà vu) automatically backs up all of the days’ changes and updates (email, client files, etc) to an external FireWire hard drive, which copies over the previous days’ backup. This ensures that if my main drive fails, my crucial documents will be out of date by no more than one day.

• MONTHLY: The same script automatically backs everything up to a second external hard drive. This ensures that if it takes a few days to realize that something *shouldn’t* have been changed, I can restore it to what it was less than a month earlier. (This is also where I made the mistake referred to above—I forgot to reset this script after replacing my main computer last fall.)

• ANNUALLY: Once a year, I’ll do a full “hard” backup of pretty much everything to DVD-ROM, then store these in a fire-resistant safe (I’ll be getting a fireproof safe soon). This is what saved the day for me in the example above.

However, this is just how I do it. Your own backup solution may vary. There's a number of popular titles available for both Mac OS X and Windows; here's just a sampling:

Recommended Mac OS X Backup software titles:

• TIme Machine (included with OS X)
• Déjà vu (my personal choice)
• Carbon Copy Cloner
• Retrospect
• SuperDuper

Recommended Windows Backup software titles (I'm not a Windows user, so I'm relying on reviews by LifeHacker.com):

• MozyHome
• Cobian Backup
• SyncBack
• Acronis True Image
• Carbonite

The bottom line is, whatever method you choose, make sure to back up your data regularly!

Featured Hosting Service: Backing Up Your Website

Which, of course, brings me to this month's featured hosting service. Note that for the following instructions may not apply to those of you with your own hosting solution; your host may use a different web control panel, or may not provide their own backup solution at all.

Client sites hosted through Brainwrap are backed up regularly, but you can use the following steps to modify this process, so backups are done either manually or on a regularly scheduled basis:

1. Visit https://www.(yourdomainname):8443
2. Click “OK” or “Continue” on any security certificate messages that pop up; these are normal
3. Enter your website control panel username & password
4. From the main screen, click “Back Up”
5. Either choose “Backup now” or “Schedule backup”
6. The file will be automatically assigned the domain name, date and time of the backup.
7. Click “Backup Now”. Depending on the size of your site, it may take several minutes to complete.
8. When the backup is complete, you’ll see a summary page. Click “OK” and you’re all set.
9. After you click “OK”, you’ll see a line-item summary of the backup, with a small floppy disk icon on the right side. If you wish, you can click this to download the entire site as a single file to your local hard drive.

To schedule an automatic backup on a regular basis, choose “Schedule Backup” instead of “Backup Now”. Then, choose the time of day, how often you want the site to be backed up, and how many backups you want to store. Note that the total number of backups are limited to the amount of server space you have.