How to backup your website while you’re building

Hey everyone, we're going to look at backing up your website, in case it all goes horribly wrong, you need to reset it, or you get hacked, or you hack it yourself by breaking it. There is an official way, where it gets done automatically every day, if you're using Bluehost, it's called CodeGuard. It is a fee, every month, but they handle everything. They send it to you as a zip file, you can reinstall it, roll back to a different date, and you can-- I'll show you the kind of caveman way to do it, you just back up yourself. Basically just rolling it into a zip, give it a good date, and you have two ways of backing it up. Let's check out how to do both of those. 

So there's two ways of backing up your site. There is the caveman way, and then there's the automatic way. You'd probably just do both. My caveman way is just doing it locally yourself manually, every time you touch your website. So that's what I do, my process is this. I'll find out Desktop, I'll go, okay, I'm about to mess around with the sites, just in case I break everything. What I do is I select it all, so I click on the top one, hold 'Shift', click on the last one. Right click it, and on a Mac it is 'Compress', on a PC, I think it's 'Send To', then there's like a zip folder. If you can't work it out, check out how to zip a file on your platform. 

So I've got the zip here on my Mac. What I do is I call it, the date. So 'Archive', and it's going to be the date, backwards. So today is the 19th, what is the date today? It is June, and it is, I don't know, what date it is today? I'm guessing, the 19th, 20th, I think, it's today. Now I know Americans do it the other way around, but you need to do it this way. So the 20th, of the 6th, 2019. It means that when I do another day, say it's next week, it's end of the month, and I can press it, I do the same thing, and I just set the date then, so it's still this month, but it's the 30th. It means they stack alpha numerically, so if I do another one, you get it, right? 

I'm going to make it super clear what I'm doing here. '19, so let's say it's later in the year, it's nearly the end of the year. It means that the bottom one is always the latest. So I know, when I'm looking at backups, I can see them in chronological order. So newest, second newest, oldest. I'll show you a bit more in practice. Where's my 'My Files', I want my websites. Yeah, this one here. So, I also put in a Zold folder, which I'll talk about in a sec as well. You can see, this is an old website. Just trying to figure one out of memory, that I've got. You can see there, that's a really old backup, this is a newer one, a newer one. 

So this is really handy, because it's 2019 now, and I can say, "Ah look, there's an old one." There's one from earlier on. It just means I can go back in case I've, you know, sometimes you just jump in, do a quick little change, and then upload the site, and then you go away, and later on you realize you've kind of wrecked one, some other page, you know, and you can roll back. 

Zold, I'll show you what I do with Zold. So, 'Desktop', 'Project2', I always put the backup. So instead of under Archive, I put them in something called Zold. Zold is just Old, with a Z in the front, so it ends up at the bottom of your alphanumeric list. So it's always at the bottom. Then I do my little archive thing, and then throw them into there, when I'm done. Put a date on them, they're all just-- just keep them in Zold. Yeah, I get a bit organizational freak about stuff like that. Weird, you're a weirdo, Dan. 

So that's the caveman way, the automatic way, which is-- you should do both, like I never rely on either of them. So Bluehost has got a pretty cool service, where are you, Bluehost? There you are. So you log in to your-- this is your Dashboard when you log in to Bluehost. Now if you're using a different hosting company, they all have something similar. Bluehost calls theirs-- they've got a couple of names for it for some reason, but if you go to Market Place, it's a paid solution. 

So theirs is called, we're going to go to their add-ons, yeah, add-ons. And there's this called Bluehost CodeGuard. I've seen it referred to as, what else do they used to call it? Backup Pro. So it's a cost as well. It's almost as much as my hosting. So you've got to decide whether this is right for you. At your stage, you might just be happy doing caveman style, but you might want this extra bit, and it just adds to your monthly account. Thank you, Bluehost. 

Remember, if you haven't signed up for Bluehost, you can go to bringyourownlaptop.com/blue, and that will get you there, and get a discount on it, and I get a small percentage of your first sign up. Doesn't cost, actually costs you less, but just a reminder. 

All right, that is it, I'll just wait for my picture to load, quite proud of that. I'm on their site, look at me. All right, that's it, I'll see you in the next video.