Would you like to know the best way to backup your DJ site? Do you want to find out how to correctly backup a website with a large music library? Want to learn how you can do this all for free? Then read on.
Before we go any further, I’d like to mention that this guide is primarily concerned with DJ’ing websites made using WordPress. WordPress is what I use for web design, and it’s the platform with which I have the most experience. I also recommend it to other DJs if they’re planning to build their own website.
Moving on…
Table of Contents
Why backing up is essential
Having a good website backup policy is essential to mitigate website disasters. If you’re not taking a backup of your website, you’re playing Russian roulette with a full chamber. Because at some point your site will break, go offline, get hacked, etc. and often, the easiest way to remedy these sorts of problems is to revert to an early version of it.
Now, there are many ways for a website to malfunction, especially if you’re using a CMS (Content Management Systems) like WordPress. Some of them include:
- Hacking, DDOS attacks, phishing
- Misconfigured site files
- Accidental lockouts
- Database corruption
- Bad updates of core, themes, and plugin files
These are just a few ways your website can break – there are many more.
So having a good backup policy is an essential backup plan for when catastrophic events occur. You see, good backups are like having an insurance policy for your car; you may never need it, but you’ll be glad it’s there when you do.
But backing up a DJ site is more complicated than backing up a regular website. DJ sites often contain large music, video, and other media libraries. The more DJ mixes/media you host on your website, the worse this problem becomes.
The Problem with backing up a DJ Site
For example, a 75-minute mixtape recorded in 320CBR MP3 will roughly total 175MB. If – like me – you start offering your followers FLAC versions of your mixes, you might end up with music files that are around 450MB or more. Once you have a few mixes/mixtapes on your website it can take up a lot of disc space. I think my music folder here on this site so far stands at around 5.5GB of music (and I’m not even a prolific producer of DJ mixes).
If you’re using WordPress and you’re using a backup plugin to automate the backup process, these plugins often take a copy of all the files contained on your website. Worst still, this will usually include your music folder. So, although your website might only be a few megabytes in size, once you add your music/mixtape download folder, your finished backups can grow to massive proportions. In the worst-case, an overnight backup can fill the entire hard disk on your web server and grind your website to a halt. I know this personally because it happened to me.
Even if you move to a third-party backup system, you only need a few mixes and large mp3 files on your website, and you’ll soon exceed your backup space allowance, especially if you want to keep multiple backups (which is a good idea, more on this later).
Additionally, a good backup strategy involves having your site backed up in more than one place – either in the form of local backups or cloud backups on a different server.
When your backups start to grow into gigabyte-sized proportions, transferring these to other servers or backing them up on a local machine can be time-consuming. This is especially true if you have slow internet like me.
4 Backup method for DJ websites
There are a couple of ways to back up a WordPress site. And some of these methods can be used with alternative CMSs and other website building solutions. They are:
- Backup using a plugin – This is the easiest way and most popular.
- Backup using hosting company services – These services are often offered by your hosting company. Not all web hosts provide backup facilities. They can vary greatly in ease of use and features.
- Backup at the server level – People who run their servers or VPSs (Virtual Private Servers) can often rely on scripts to automate their backup process. These methods are free but complex if you don’t know what you’re doing, and it’s also easier to break stuff. This is how I do it, but I’ve been running Linux servers for nearly ten years now.
- Taking a manual copy of the site files and a database dump – Often, this involves simply mirroring the website folder on a remote server with a folder contained on a local PC. And then taking a dump of the website database. This is a time-consuming method, and it can be easy to lose track of changes and site files. It’s also harder to automate.
If you’ve opted to build a Dj website using a free website building service, you probably won’t see the above options. The free website services are limited; their bugs are usually automatically patched, and all updates are tested and then auto-applied by the service provider. Backups are less critical for these types of services. You’re unlikely to have database problems and similar problems because the crucial parts of your website are inaccessible and taken care of by the service provider. Your main problem with the free website services is keeping attackers out of your site – so make sure to use strong passwords and enable 2FA where possible.
How to back up a DJ website
So, what’s the best way to back up a DJ’ing website which contains a large music library?
First up, if you’re using WordPress or a similar CMS, then make sure to choose a backup plugin that allows you to exclude folders. You’ll then want to exclude the folder which contains all your DJ mixes/music files from the backup process. This will prevent your large music folder from being included in your backups.
Next, you have a couple of options.
Firstly, if your website only hosts a handful of DJ mixes and music, you could not back these files up. If you ever must restore your website, you can rebuild any download links manually. This may or may not be a big deal depending on how many download links your website has.
Secondly, for bigger DJ’ing websites, and websites containing lots of music and download links, you can get away with mirroring the download folder via FTP sync software. This is how I do it. I use SyncBack Pro to sync a specific folder on my desktop PC with this website’s music download folder on my remote web server. Any file added to the folder on my desktop will automatically upload overnight to my server when the scheduled backup profile is run.
You don’t have to use SyncBack for this; there are many similar programs that will perform this task.
One handy thing about this method of backup is that – when uploading a new DJ mix to my sites – I simply add the music files to my local music backup folder, and my syncing program will automatically upload it when it runs.
Basically, you’re treating your website backups and music download folder backups as two separate problems with this method.
Things to watch out for
Here are a few things to watch out for:
- Make sure to note the permissions and users on your web server’s music download folder. When you restore this folder all the server permissions and users will need to be reapplied – otherwise your download won’t work.
- Don’t rename files on the local PC. Copy the naming conventions from the server and not from the desktop. Some download plugins can swap out spaces for underscores. If this happens, make sure to copy naming conventions from the server-side because your download plugin will use these, and they’ll be stored in your websites’ database. If they are different, your website download plugin won’t find the files when someone chooses to download them. They’ll effectively be new files even though the only difference might be an underscore instead of a space.
- If you’re building a new website, you’ll want to upload all your files, set your download links up, and THEN mirror your download directory to your backup destination.
- It’s a good idea to make sure you keep incremental backups of your site files. Because if you’re unfortunate enough to suffer a malware infection on your website, sometimes the attackers may wait a while before triggering the infection or taking control of your site. If you only keep a single backup, your backups could become compromised. Personally, I keep several months’ worth of backups on my local machine. You don’t need to keep incremental backups of your music files as these cannot be infected like your website.
- It’s also a good idea to have a copy of your site backups and any database backups on multiple machines and maybe even push them to cloud storage. As you never know when a hard drive might die.
- Try to enable logging and notifications on your sync program and do the same with your backup plugin (if possible). You need to be aware that either program or plugin is working correctly, and you need to be informed if either stops working or you have a problem.
- Try to automate your backups if possible. If you’re backing things up manually, it’s easy to forget to do it or be too busy to perform a backup.
- And, always always always test your backups. I learnt the hard way that not all backup plugins work: I had to rebuild the website from scratch due to bad backups. This can be a real headache when your site gets big and more complex.
As you can see, backing up a DJ style website isn’t easy. The large music collections on such websites make it more difficult. But splitting the backup process into two jobs is (IMO) the best way to solve this.
DJ Kippax