photo credit: ben matthews :::

Does today’s date seem important but you don’t know why? Did you get a cold shoulder when you came home from work and can’t figure out why? Congratulations, you just missed an important event like a birthday, anniversary or another holiday that requires you to acknowledge the event with a gift or flowers. Here is a free way to never forget an important date again.

Amazon has a free Gift Organizer service that keeps track of important events, gifts given and reminds you beforehand so you have no excuse to miss another anniversary.

Simply go to Amazon’s Gift Organizer and enter the names, birthdays and genders of your friends and family, important dates (don’t forget Valentine’s Day) then sit back and relax knowing that you will receive a reminder email when it gets close to the date. Even better, the email will contain suggestions for items that correspond with the person and the occasion.

The Gift Organizer will even keep track of prior purchases so you don’t accidentally buy the same talking Billy Bass fish for your Uncle Joe’s birthday. Never again forget the 6 week anniversary with your new girlfriend or your god son’s first birthday.

Everyone will think you are so thoughtful when they receive the perfect gift from you, on the correct day!

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photo credit: charlesdyer

Yesterday I was sending some links to websites I have designed to a potential client and found out that one of my website databases was corrupt. It was so bad that the site wouldn’t even load. I started to panic when I realized I didn’t have a recent backup of this site. In fact, this site hasn’t been backed up since last April and I have a ton of new information posted on it that I didn’t want to have to recreate. There are multiple MySql databases on this site and I didn’t want to overwrite every one when there is only a problem with one of them. In the end I was able to enlist the help of my web hosting company and they fixed the one database with my old backup which didn’t affect the rest of the site.

Having gone through all of this it reminded me that it is just as important to backup your websites as it is to backup your computer. If my website hosting company had a disaster there is a possibility that I wouldn’t be able to recover my site. I am now adding monthly backup routine for all of my websites so I don’t have to worry about data loss.

If you have cpanel access to your website, backups are a breeze. Just go into your cpanel and look for either Backup or Backup Wizard and follow the instructions. You can do two different types of backups. One is just the databases and the other is your entire site. There is a great article with instructions and pictures that explains the backups in greater detail at themelab.com

After my little event yesterday I decided that it is important to do both the full site backup as well as backing up each individual database into it’s own file. I don’t mind asking my web host to reload my backup but if I had backed up my databases individually it would have made my downtime much less.

Your Daily 15 - Go to your cpanel and make a backup of your website. Download the backup to your computer then burn it onto a disk and file it somewhere safe so that no matter what happens you will be prepared. Add this task to your calendar and backup your sites monthly so that there is no chance to loose all of your hard work.

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