Bluehost, our web hosting provider for the
idgenweb.org server, makes periodic backups of
all accounts, but they will not restore individual files. Their backups are intended to
allow recovery in the infrequent case of a full disk or server failure and may not be
completely up to date. Roughly once a month I make an FTP backup of the full account on a
remote computer. Note that this monthly backup only covers those counties (and the state
pages) that reside on this server - not those on other servers such as Rootsweb.
For purposes of being able to restore individual files within your own county or special
project, it would be very advisable to keep a local copy on your own computer.
I know many of you keep local copies as a matter of course by doing updates locally and
then copying those updates to the remote server. But some of you may at least
occasionally make changes to your remote files without first making those changes locally.
If you do, I strongly advise that you periodically refresh all files on your local
computer. That will protect you against situations where you might accidentally change or
delete a remote file without noticing that change for a while.
Note that a full backup of the data in all accounts is taking place tonight, over night.
That will be done by means of FTP from Bluehost to a computer on my home network. For this
reason, overall performance tonight may be slower than normal.
If I can ever help with any sort of restore or rebuild process from the most recent
monthly remote backup, feel free to give me a yell.
Mike St. Clair
State Coordinator - IDGENWEB