Apologies to anybody who visited this blog over the past 24 hours as it was not working correctly.

On doing a little detective work behind the scenes I found that for some unknown reason the database decided to empty itself which took the blog down for just over a day.

Luckily I keep a series of backups so I just asked my host to restore from one of my backups and we are now up and running.

My Dad always says that data doesn’t exist unless you have at least 3 copies of it and he drummed that into me from an early age.

If you take one thing from reading this blog, take this:

Back up your websites, MySQL databases and anything else you hold dear to at least three different, geographically separate places.

For example:

1 backup to your spare PC at home, 1 backup to an external disk drive you keep in your (locked) drawer at work/in the office and one backup hidden on some of your hosting space i.e. your Hostgator reseller account.

So even if your site is hacked and then your house burns down, you still have two different copies of your precious data.

Please, go and backup everything now.

Then draw up a backup schedule and get into the routine of backing data up.