This post may contain affiliate links.
Cockatoos On The Beach
Epic Fail
Hello and welcome to the next instalment in my affiliate marketing journey. As part of the training that we’re going through, we are encouraged to record all our successes and failures or mistakes. Well, here’s a mistake I can share with you right now. In my last blog, I was talking about the importance of taking back ups and saving your work often. More about the back ups in a minute, but first an epic fail on my part.
I had just completed a modest effort of a blog and in my enthusiasm to get it on-line, I hit the “publish” button in WordPress only to be presented with a message saying “current session has timed out” or words to that effect. I desperately tried to back-track to the previous screen where I had written the content but alas, it was no more. Why didn’t I take my own advice to save my work often? It’s gone, forever lost in another dimension of the interweb, never to be seen again. Unless… here what follows is my attempt to recreate it. (Press “Save Draft” now.)
12 Month Goal
I wanted to remind myself of my goal for the next twelve months. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before but I’m not embarking on this journey to get rich; I have a modest ambition. My one year goal is to make enough to match the amount I am drawing from my pension. It’s not a fortune by any means and I think, given Dean Holland’s mentoring reputation, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility.
More On Backups
In my last blog, “Why Is My Computer So Slow“, I was saying how I was yet to discover how to back up this website/owned asset I have created. I had a couple of suggestions from my fellow course takers and decided to research the subject myself. I thought it might be useful to anyone following my progress to share what I discovered and ended up using.
I am using WordPress as the platform to create and record my owned asset (AKA, blog or website). In WordPress there is a feature that enables you to access “Plugins”. These are bits of software that add specific features or functionality to a website and are designed to merge seamlessly with existing website platforms or content management systems such as WordPress. There are simple plugins that can, for example, let you add a contact form to your site. There are plugins for more complex functionality such as e-commerce systems or social media integration. Most plugins come with a free version. In my case, I was looking for plugins that would enable me to create a back up of my website.
In the WordPress Plugin-Add Plugins section, I entered “back up” in the built in search facility and was surprised by how many matches came back in the search results. The first one I saw was called “UpdraftPlus: WordPress Backup and Migration Plugin”. According to the description, it has more than three million active installations so who am I to argue. I clicked the “Install Now” button and it was added within a few seconds.
It allows the user to backup to various repositories such as Dropbox, Google Drive or even email (can’t get my head around that one). The paid version gives even more choices of platforms to back up to. It also has the capacity to allow migration of your website to another web host server or domain, not that I would need that facility right now.
It allows manual backups or you can schedule it to run every few hours, daily, weekly, monthly or whatever frequency you desire. I had a couple of manual goes just to get the feel and decided on a daily back up strategy going forward. Restores are easy too apparently, although I haven’t had the need to do that yet.
Well, I hope that’s been useful. Please let me know in the comments.
Until next time,
Keep safe.
Sorry to hear about you losing your work.
I recommend you write your blog post on a word document or maybe on Google Docs. That way, even if something happen to your blog in the future, all your written work can still be retrieved from Google Drive.
Thanks Alan, that’s a great suggestion.
I’ve done that as well, lost work that is, too many times! Very annoying.
Are you sure your hosting provider doesn’t have automated backups and the possibilty of creating manual ones? Most hosting companies do.
If not, I think the plugin is a great solution.
Cheers, Katrin
Andy, . Don’t worry we will do this. Secondly, my way of doing it is I don’t write it in WordPress I only paste it into WordPress. I usually type it in notes on my iPad or phone and I usually dictate thoughts and words and just capture it on the Notes app. once that’s done I then read it edit it space it out and only then do I copy and paste it directly into a new post in WordPress. That’s when I hit the ‘save draft’ button, I then add photos, highlights, links headings etc. and then publish. Once it’s published I use the same, backup migration add-on app which I use to back up my whole WordPress site and then download it. The problem with all these systems as they time out, or they remove things after a certain number of days etc. Great information and value and I look forward to your next post. Just keep going. It’ll be amazing to watch what happens. Take care all the best thanks, Atif
Yes these hiccups can be avoided. Plus once it happens, we hit “save” at every given opportunity!
Congratulations, Andy! This is a fantastic piece of content that your readers will undoubtedly enjoy, just as I did. Like you, I believe we are all on this journey for a second opportunity to achieve a source of income and alleviate our financial challenges. Keep going, and remember, you are not alone in this endeavor. All the best.
Andy, there’s nothing quite as bad as losing your work before it’s published. I’m embarrassed to admit I’ve done this more than once. As Alan said previously, I had this happen one too many times before I started drafting all my posts in a word document before copying and pasting it over. Although this doesn’t help you if you are adding images and formatting the page, but saving frequently will. I know I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, and it definitely stinks to have this happen. Also… I’m glad to see you sharing your vulnerable moments. It’s situations like this that we all can share and learn from with each other.
Yes, hit the ‘save draft’ every time! I like working directly into WP as it helps me to format as I go and see visually what I like or not. Thought the Wordfence plugin did backups….. I will have to review. Thanks for info.
Oh, been there and done that!
In fact, as we are subject to regular electicity outages, my computer was often shuting down in the middle of things.
I once lost so much work that I went out and bought a surge protected Uniteruptable Power Supply and a 4 Tb NAS back up system. All good you might think.
In Novemeber we had a hugue thunder clap and lightening strike…. it fried the PUS battery, and whilst not imacting the data on the PC it corupted the NAS drives, resuting in days of recovery work and the loss of great swaves of data!
Hi Andy,
We have a similar 12-month goal. I feel that the mentors at Dean Holland’s Internet Profits offer a strong foundation to help us achieve our goals.
I am using WP as well. I’ll have to check out the plug-in that you mentioned. Thanks for this useful information!
I look forward to your future posts!
All the best!
Milissa Neirotti
Hi Milissa, glad you found it useful. There are many plugins for backups; I was kinda lazy and just went for the first one that came up.:)
Hi Andy,
I have similar issues when blogging. I’ve lost more than one post 🙂 but made a choice to write all my blog posts on MS Word first. This also allows me to have a back up copy of each post saved on my computer. I will copy and paste the post into WP when I am ready to post. I haven’t lost a post doing it this way.
Keep up the great work!
Denny
Hi, Andy! I love the view and your cockatoos, too!
All bloggers have probably lost a post at least once. I’ll share a tip I learned. If you click Preview, your article will open in a second tab, as it would be if you published it. You can then click Save Draft in your dashboard. The benefit of doing this is if something goes wrong in the saving process, you’ll always be able to copy and paste from the Preview page. I have never lost my work when I click save; though I’ve heard of this happening to others. Sometimes something wonky happens to my words. They get mistyped or strung together without spaces or something. It’s hard to figure out how to describe what happens.
But if I’ve clicked Preview, I can quickly fix it by copying and pasting.
May I ask, why would you back up your blog? What could happen to it? I think of the internet as a permanent place. Maybe it isn’t?
Hi Nakina, Thanks for the comment. You were asking why back up your blog. To be honest, I don’t think the internet is particularly secure/permanent. It’s probably because in the unlikely event of something drastic happening with WordPress, I’d rather be safe than sorry. I find it hard enough to write these blogs and if I ever lost the site entirely I would be devastated. If I’m going to attract an audience, I want my site to be around for a long time and if does disappear at least I can get it back up and running again without too much effort. Hope that helps. Take care. Andy