Last night, another blog of mine was hacked. When I say hacked, I mean that someone or several someones managed to access the home directory of my website, where all file are contained, and delete each and every one of those files. I was foolish enough to not have made backups of the files, but I was smart enough to make weekly backups of what really matters: the database that contained all entries, comments and general settings for the blog. It was annoying to have to re-download WordPress, install it and then configure things with themes, but at least my writing was saved. Saved for two reasons: the hackers didn’t bother to or couldn’t get to the database, and I had backups stored on my computer.

Learn from my mistake: always back up your stuff! Back up manually, or generate backups if your hosting account is with a webhost that uses cPanel, or another type of account management area that generates backups. If you are using WordPress, you can also make use of the WP-Backup plugin to automatically create a copy of your database and email it to you on an hourly, daily, weekly or monthly basis. For more information on that plugin, see the following article: WordPress plugin: WP-Backup.