As an engineer that is in the process of starting up his own LLC, my scope of work has varied greatly. A young engineer starting out begins a career concerned primarily about design, certifications, and job opportunities. As a “more experienced” ( I’m not going to say OLD) engineer that is planning on starting a new LLC, the concerns include designs, certifications & licensing, business development, accounting practices, insurance coverage, planning for emergencies, etc. One of the unexpected issues I’m addressing today is the failure to back up the blog prior to switching hosting plans.

As far as the details, I’ve used a FTP client to download all of the files I could find on the old hosting plan. After download, I deleted the plan, and started the migration process of assigning the domain to a new hosting plan. This process takes a while (up to 48 hrs) on the server side. Once the domain was assigned to the new hosting plan, I proceeded to upload all of my saved files to the new server. Then… the pages didn’t work. Unfortunately, I failed to download the information contained on the server databases, which weren’t part of the file download. Oops…

The moral is to always try to remember to back up your electronic files. Regularly schedule a time to back up all important files. Another IMPORTANT note is to attempt to access the data from backup before assuming that you’re safe.

-M