One of the worries of anyone running a website on a computer they don’t control is what happens if when the computer fails. For a long while (pre Mac days) I handled it by, at least once a month downloading a mirror of everything on the site’s server, and backuping the database manually once a week. Now the problem with that was everything was done manually and if I got busy with things, or got lazy, it didn’t always get done. (OK rarely got done.)
Enter the Mac. The ftp program I use, Transmit, has a function that is just made for website backing up called Synchronize. The nice thing with Synchronize is that it only downloads new files or files that have changed since the last Synchronize. Since I always hear about people making their Mac do things on a schedule I figured that there way some way to make the process automatic. There is a neat little application that comes with OS X 10.5 called Automator that will Automate (duh) darn near anything on the Mac. With a little help with a little help of this Howto. I quickly set up a nightly backup of the site. Throw in a WordPress Plugin that backup the database nightly and emails me the file. I now have a daily backup of the site. Add in the OS X Timemachine, and I now have two level of automatic backup. Which should protect me from anything short of EPIC LEVEL BAD LUCK. On second thought with the way my luck runs, I should set up a iCal event to remind me save the backups to CD.
