This is fresh out of the oven. I was importing one of my client’s websites into Github, in order to be able to track and easily revert changes to his website. This is a process I had done lots and lots of times, so nothing new there.
But for some reason, git decided to break things down. Suddenly, I had lost the website files, all of them. I searched online on how to revert changes, and it didn’t work for me, because I hadn’t committed my previous changes. I was literally done. There was no backups on the server, and I had no way to restore the files. My client was running a campaign on adwords worth thousands of dollars, which made thigs even worse. Fortunately, I had a backup from a few days back on my computer that I restored, and reuploaded my code changes. Our website was back and running in 15 minutes.
I’m still a bit frightened as I write this. I have now configured backups on the server, so in case something like this happens again, we can easily restore back any changes.
Do you have a backup strategy in place? If not, get to work now. You’ll not regret it. Feel free to share your setup in the comments below.
I use Syncovery.com with AWS S3 for file level syncs. I do plan to use Github for internet facing version repository, so thanks for the heads up that it is not a backup option.
Hey stanford… Theoretically speaking, Github can act as a backup of your code and smaller files. However, as the repository grows, it suffers from performance issues, and Github isn’t designed to handle large files. See here: Github: Working with large files
Even if all of your files are stored in Github, it’s advisable to have an alternative backup system.