Business Continuity Plan For Your Blog

When the September 11 attacks happened, more than the unfortunate loss of lives, several businesses were caught holding empty bags as they watched their offices crumble along with their servers and data vaults. Huge amounts of business data were irretrievably lost. Some businesses barely recovered and some eventually folded.

The 9/11 attacks served as a catalyst for businesses to take business continuity planning to the next level. Companies were scrambling to house their critical data in separate locations, backup plans became more elaborate, and business continuity plans became the norm. All these efforts were geared towards ensuring that their businesses would weather any similar attacks or disruptions in the future.

Blogging is no different from these businesses, even more so, as our product is purely data based, we need to take these threats seriously. What if your hosting provider goes under or your site crashes or with a single mistaken click, you’ve managed to delete all your blogging information?

The following tips, although basic at most, could help you ensure that whatever happens, you can rebuild your blog from scratch, if need be.

1. Back-up everything. Especially your images. Don’t leave them scattered around your desktop. Label everything properly to ensure that you’re able to identify which images goes to which post.

2. Configure your blog to send your posts to your email account everytime you publish. Most blogging platforms allow you to do this.

3. Get an extra hard-disk to save your files. Depending on the volume of your post, perform a monthly or a weekly backup of everything you’ve written.

4. Alternatively, you could register in one of those free file hosting sites to ensure that you’re not keeping all your data in one nest.

5. Prepare your own blog continuity plan. Think of the potential things that could happen and devise a documented plan to deal with it.

You could choose to ignore these precautions and view them as unnecessary and a waste of time. That is of course your prerogative. But just remember that prior to 9/11, a lot of businesses were also of the same opinion and look where they are now.

The continuity of your blog as your business is too important to be left in the hands of other people, your hosting company for example. If you want to be able to sleep comfortably every night, you need to take matters in your own hands.