Rather than deny the month of July existed, I decided to dedicate a post to a selection of links that I discovered and found useful or interesting throughout the month.

Links of The Month

1. Thinking about starting a business? Here is why you shouldn’t!

Clearly I’m wired up a little dodgy when the perceived downsides to business inspire me to work even harder. Either way this is just a single post from the Quick Sprout blog by Neil Patel. It’s turning out to be a great resource so if you have an interest in entrepreneurship you’ll probably want to check it out sometime.

2. 60+ Awesome WordPress Tutorials

Pretty much one of the best collections of WordPress Tutorials that I’ve come across. WordPress is the powerful blogging engine behind many of the biggest blogging and social media inspired sites on the net today. As you may already know, I provide my professional web development services on WordPress and even I managed to learn a couple tricks in here.

3. Website Backups & What to Do When They Fail

Yeah, you caught me! I snuck a little self promotion in here but for very good reason. Within the month of July not only did my laptop say goodnight for the final time but my backup PC had a little fit as well. Luckily with my slightly excessive backup solutions I was able to work from the library, a friends house and finally get another PC up and running without any data loss or major setbacks at all.

4. 1,000 True Fans

This was my introduction to kk.org and I have to say I was impressed. The depth and insight that is shared so often is quite amazing. The theory of 1000 true fans is definitely one to read.

5. Are You Afraid of Being the Small Fish in the Pond?

Last but not least is a post from Slacker Reform. Don’t be deceived by the lenth of this post, if you take this advice to heart there is a ton more value to offer than you could ever imagine.

So there you have it…

Without drowning you in a waterfall of links, I’ve shared a select few links that I’ve enjoyed or found useful in hope that they can do the same for you.  If you’ve enjoyed this post and would like to see more like this then do let me know. Or perhaps you’ve found some great links on the web this month. Why not leave a comment below…

(Obvious SPAM will be shot out of the sky, like Jack on Christmas Eve)

The Prevention

There is no better way to protect yourself from these failures than prevention. You should always keep all of your online files backed up locally and even on other online networks. A couple of few great places to back up your files depending on your requirements are:

• Gmail Account – If you run a blog or have just a few small files then this can be a great low cost option. There are plugins that can automatically email your database backups and everything else can be mailed accross in an instant.
• Your Hard Drive – When you are constantly working “in the cloud” you can often overlook the fact that you have a huge amount of storage space literally at your desk. Make a habit of keeping a copy of everything that you create for your website even if it’s created solely online. To make yourself even more bullet-proof you can ever have your hard drive automatically backup elsewhere.
• Amazon Web Services – I would like to note that this is definitely not for the newcomer, however it’s worth mentioning as there are many backup options that tie in quite nicely with the variety of services offered by Amazon. I’m only just scratching the surface with their solutions but already I love it.

As I mentioned above there are even ways to automate a lot of your backing up so you are always secure even if you’re not consciously thinking about it at the time. A good example of this is the WP DB Backup if you are running a WordPress blog. However even the best backup systems have the potential to go wrong even if it’s through human error and that’s where the next section of this post comes through…

The Cure

You get online and see that the nightmare scenario has actually happened… Your website is covered in database errors or even worse, you no longer have a website at all. This can be a terrifying situation to be in and no matter how much work you’ve put into a project, this is the very last thing you want to see. I’ll ask you to put away the noose however, it may not be the end of the world yet…

With some of the more simple database failures it could be that your site hasn’t actually vanished and the data isn’t gone, it’s just hiding. I’ve had it happen before where a my WordPress blog would load as a blank page whatever I tried to do. After the initial panic and a little more research I managed to discover that the problem was caused by something I’d installed onto the blog a day before and it was possible to just disable the new plugin via the database.

No, my site has definitely disappeared…

The first thing you will consider is if you’ve made backups at any stage. If so, are they recent enough that it’s an option to just roll back a little while and just miss a few of your more recent updates? It can be disappointing to lose your recent work but often it can work out a lot easier and cheaper in the long run.

If you have no backups whatsoever, you may try contacting the company that actually host your website. Often your host will perform regular backups so that even if you have not backed up a single thing they will have a copy somewhere. The trouble with this solution is that it can often be costly and you cannot guarantee that they will have everything you need.

The final things that you can try as a last resort and I really mean as a last resort is this; Nearly all search engines these days will create a cache of your website to make their life easier. This basically means that they hold a copy of all the websites in their database for a limited time so that they do not have to actually query every site each time a search is run.

Now in many search engines you will often find that there is a little link at the bottom of each result that is called ‘Cached’. When you click on this link you are taken to the search engines copy of your web page which can often be a couple of days old depending on how often they refresh your site. What this means for you is that you can run a search for your website in all the major search engines and collect the cached files of your website and replace it from these.

You can find a pretty comprehensive list of the search engines that keep a cache here. Before you get too excited though, please bare in mind that this will be a very labor intensive method depending on the size of your website and you are almost guaranteed to not find everything that was on your site before the crash. As a last ditch effort though, it can take away some of the pain of losing your site and help you to get back on your feet a little quicker.

Armed with this information you not only have the power to pick up the pieces on a lost website, but ultimately protect it in future. As always the best thing that you can do in any situation is backup in advance and with the ideas provided here you should be easily on your way to turning your next disaster into a minor set back because it’s not a question of if, but when…