You should back up your website, depending on how often
you update the website. For some, it might be once every
few days, and for others, it might be once a day or more.
You want to back it up enough that you won't have to lose
hours or days worth of work, having to recreate pages, images,
etc.
How do you back up a website?
The ideal way is to back up the site through your web host's
control panel. More than likely, you can call their support
line if you have a question about using the backup utility.
Beware that if you are backing up the entire site, your website
may be down while the backup happens.
Once it's complete, it will push the site archive down to
your local computer.
Many servers are set up differently,
but this is a good rule of thumb:
Your home folder - (often named htdocs or www)
This is where
your html files, images, etc are located. You want to be sure
to recursively back up everything in this folder, including
any folders.
Your CGI-BIN folder - (usually called cgi-bin)
If you are using perl or CGI, this is where your files will
be stored. You may not have this folder.
You want to use an FTP program and download these folders
to your computer, and preferably burn the folder to a new
CD-ROM periodically.
Your FTP program should check for these file types automatically,
but just in case, you need to follow these rules: Binary mode is for images (.gif, .jpg, etc), documents (.doc,
.pdf, etc) and archives (.zip, .rar, .exe)
ASCII mode is for pages (.htm,
.html, .shtm, .shtml, .asp, .jsp, .js, etc), cgi (.cgi, .pl,
etc) and text (.txt, .log, etc)
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