Don't Forget to BACK UP | Bloggers Lair | Yakezie Forums

Many of you sent me e-mails over the past week when you noticed that my site was either down or returning errors. Well, my site was hacked for the second time in as many months and I couldn't get the site restored from the host side since this was a server intrusion

I was going to quit blogging altogether…and then it hit me.

I had downloaded a clean copy of my entire site the last time I did a restoration about a month ago.  So, even if you have every bit of security in place, you have back-up automatically run, etc., take the time to run a free FTP program and download EVERYTHING, then export your database as well.

You can not know how much being down for a week cost me in time, stress, energy, and money. Take my advice. It will save you from a monster headache.

I got hit as well. Glad to hear that you're back up and running.

Sorry to hear this happened again. :( I've been using Code Garage to keep a backup of everything, as well as WP DB Manager to send copies of the DB to my email.

Good to hear that you had a backup and have it all sorted out.

@Edward – As you mentioned you already know you were hit, I tried to access your blog yesterday and strange code appeared between your header and your first post.

20s Finances said:

Oh, I am so glad to hear you didn't lose everything! Phew! I have a DB plugin as well, but I also manually download all of my site files every month.

How do you manually download your site's files? All I use now is a Wordpress plugin that emails me a backup copy of my blog every day. I'm not sure this is enough in the event my site is hacked. 

Thanks for the reminder.  I'm glad to hear you were able to get everything back up and running =)

TacklingOurDebt said:

Good to hear that you had a backup and have it all sorted out.

@Edward – As you mentioned you already know you were hit, I tried to access your blog yesterday and strange code appeared between your header and your first post.

That's how I first realized that there was something wrong. Then I started looking under the hood and found an encoded script in EVERY one of my php files. Luckily, I learned my backup lesson when my host went under two months ago.

The College Investor said:

I'm glad you're back as well.  I recommend Backup Buddy.  It saves everything (database, themes, etc) into a zip, and allows for easy restores of server migrations.

 

It is a paid plugin, but well worth it.  I used it to move The College Investor, and I did a clean install and it brought the site right back up!

I second the recommendation.  I use it to back up 100% of my site to Amazon S3 monthly, and the database weekly.  You can also use it to set up 1 generic site to use as a template for other niche sites, reducing setup time by…a lot.

Backup Buddy is a great tool indeed!!!!

The only other sure fire way is run FTP and download everything, then head over and export your database…

I'm pretty annoyed at the moment though it could be worse.  A niche site I never really did much with got hacked.  I was faithfully running database backups and such and for whatever reason, even that didn't take care of getting things back.  I'm not very concerned because it was getting a couple hits a week, but I'm concerned if it got through at some point to either of my 'real' sites.  I guess I need to look at ways of performing full file backups, since this hack likely took shape in some file access.