I am rethinking my plans for the maintenance of my site after last evening’s class. Although I still would like to eventually give it away so that when I am old and feeble, I won’t have to choose between spending my non-existent social security check on upkeep of the site or spending it on food. (Invisible money goes fast.) Nevertheless, for the time being:
I plan to back up my material in several formats. The database information (i.e. all the fields from transcription) will be saved in Excel and/or Access and put on a flash drive, which I will then save far away from my home and people who may want to steal it. Any textual information will be saved in a Word file and also backed up in several locations. The images of the sources will have the same fate.
I don’t really understand how to “share servers” so that if one goes down, I will not lose everything. However, I’ll figure it out, so sign me up.
That’s all I’ve got right now. If the “mirror” site is as easy as some people imply, I would look into that as well. However, I infer that things that are easy to computer savvy folks are not easy for me. Have to figure out all of the “sync” information, anyway.
Most of the time you will not have to figure out “synching” and mirrored servers. When you sign up for a place to host your site, those are usually options that you can pay for. That is, unless you are running your own IT shop and hosting your own server, in which case there are a whole lot more things to worry about.
Just knowing you need these things, and why you need them puts you ahead of about 90% of the people who put up web sites.
Seems to me that somebody somewhere is archiving web projects, or that they should. I know Archive-It archives some projects, but I don’t know what the criteria is to work with them. For example, I know that they archive .ogv websites for LAtin America. So when NIcaragua changed presidents (to Ortega), Ortega destroyed the previous administration’s website. No on had a copy except Archive-it (Internet Archive). They archive by doing regular crawls of a website, so once you tell them the pages you want crawled (adding metadata to that) it’s automatic for participants. Check out the WayBack Machine (run by same folks), and you can see what websites looked like in the past. http://www.archive.org/web/web.php
That seems like the easiest way to back up the website, but not the data that feeds it.
I bet big geneaology groups would be thrilled to take over your magnificent production when your retirement comes up!
Thanks for the information!
Rachel – that site is really amazing, thanks for the link.