The Wisconsin Skier

Is very important. There are a number of lightning bolts that can strike your website and force you to start over from scratch, and two of them have happened to myself.

The first bolt that hit a site of mine was it got cracked. Fortunately, not too much damage was done, the crackers (I don’t use the word hack here, as hacking can be a “white-hat” activity, but cracking is almost always “black-hat”) did not destroy my data, they just broke into the site and created their own index.html file with some gibberish about the villain of 9/11. I traced the attack to some people in Turkey who used a script to search websites with the particular combination of CMS and version I was using. They then used a known exploit to get in. All I needed to do was to remove the index.html and replace the old CMS files with the latest version. There is a lesson here, keep your CMS software up to date. Sometimes updates are for new features, but more often they are to patch security holes. Also, it is probably good practice to remove references to the CMS you use, both visible and invisible, but that is not really a trivial task as there are a number of ways a person can find out what CMS you use.

The second bolt though was more destructive. It was a web-host system failure. Some of my sites were restored by the vendor’s backup, but not all. The one site missed had to be built completely from scratch, that is the materials I had created for that site were gone.

So, how does one back up their site?
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