Experience. You learn from it.
Personally, I enjoy learning from other people's experience so I don't have to make the mistake myself. We all know we should back up our data. Especially documents. Who cares if Windows corrupts. After all, a fresh install is just the trick sometimes or after a year or so of running a build. But it would be nice to know that your documents are nice and safe, on another partition, drive, or even on a RAID config.
My experience has led me to realise that websites also should be backed up. At least, the important files and those that are edited regularly should be.
Recently I took it upon myself to edit my Church Youth's website - http://www.youth.firstlisburn.org/
The website was good, but it was too busy and complicated navigation wise. So I got rid of all the clutter and banners and pictures which were actually links.... and made a nice menu type thing.
However, upon completing the Contact page, I may have accidently overwritten the MAIN website's contact page. Well, let me tell you, the file was gone. There's no recycle bin via FTP and if there is, I need to know about it.
Do you ever get the feeling where you think, "holy crap..." and no words can describe how you feel? Not to mention you break into a nervous sweat when you realise you've just done something incredibly stupid? Well, that was me.
Fortunately, before moving to Microsoft's Expression Web 2, I had used Adobe Contribute, which, thankfully, creates backups in the _baks folder on the web server. Also thankfully, I remembered this within 2 minutes of completely erasing the contacts page. Had I not found the backup, the contacts page would have taken days...yes, days... to re-create.
So the lesson for today?
If you're regularly playing about with website editing, or FTP, make a backup of the important files! Don't learn the hard way (and I was lucky!)
Digiman out.
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