Climate Audit is still down. Are you wondering what could happen if my server ever went down? Mostly, you wouldn’t be able to read the blog for some period of time– but the blog would soon reappear. I use the WP-Database backup plugin; I’ve set the plugin to send me email me backups every 24 hours.

Is this enough to ensure the blog is properly saved? No.

Only the text for blog posts and comments are stored in the database. However, my blog (and most climate blogs) frequently display linked images. I self host most my images; this means most images are stored on my hosts server. If that server went down and neither my hosting service nor I backed up my files, some content would be lost.

Lucky for my, my hosting service does back up their servers. So, I mostly count on my host to maintain backups for the site. But, I had a problem with a hosting service many years ago which left me a bit paranoid about hosting services.

To ensure my images aren’t destroyed, I manually back up the most recent month’s entry in the wp-uploads folder in the wp-content directory for wordpress. How often? Well.. not often enough. I back up the previous months uploads the beginning of each month; I store these at home on my mac.

If my hosting service lets me down, I might, theoretically, lose 1 month’s worth of images. However, for the most part, after about a week of aggravation, the blog could be reconstituted on a new host with little loss.

Meanwhile: Let’s all hope Climate Audit gets their hardware issues sorted.