findtim
Top Contributor
its my annual backup rant, sorry
i have all my hosting with netvirtue and they are great, as an experiment i have put one client on crazydomains and they have actually been wonderful.
but the difference is netvirtue give me a 15 day archive of website backups and crazy domains give me none, which means that if i get hacked on a friday, backed up on a saturday ( which OVERWRITES the previous backup ), then find out i've been hacked on the sunday i ONLY have a hacked backup of my site !
so the solution is , do not rely on your host to backup your site, implement other methods like backup buddy , infinatewp, updraftplus and many others.
also CHECK your backups, make sure all the files are there.
story: and the reason for this post, a month ago i had a new client come to me as they weren't happy with the web designer they had, so i backed it all up and moved it, only to find it was totally hacked, the worst i have seen, to the point of "throw it away and start again" but i had to deal with it, as i dug deeper and deeper into the site to find the hack, which had back doors, i finally fixed it, all the software and malware i used was not picking up the dodgy files, so i used chris burgess's advice which is " look for the date last modified" which is slow but helpful and eventually lead me to the problem files.
i also found a user had been hacked and that was another entry point to put in dodgy posts and links, the site was sending out 500 emails a minute ! there was also hidden posts to p#rn sites and hidden files with java scripts.
but when i finally felt i had fixed it , MANY images no longer existed? so then i went deeper and found that the image paths were to the past designers own root so actually NEVER existed on the domain !!!! a weird way of doing things, so the path to an image was www.designer.com/3.jpg instead of www.clients-domain/3.jpg
so my back up NEVER had all the files, hindsight is the best site but i just didn't think someone would be stupid enough to do that ! anyway i got lucky and "way back when" had all the images stored.
i hope that helps someone in the future.
tim
i have all my hosting with netvirtue and they are great, as an experiment i have put one client on crazydomains and they have actually been wonderful.
but the difference is netvirtue give me a 15 day archive of website backups and crazy domains give me none, which means that if i get hacked on a friday, backed up on a saturday ( which OVERWRITES the previous backup ), then find out i've been hacked on the sunday i ONLY have a hacked backup of my site !
so the solution is , do not rely on your host to backup your site, implement other methods like backup buddy , infinatewp, updraftplus and many others.
also CHECK your backups, make sure all the files are there.
story: and the reason for this post, a month ago i had a new client come to me as they weren't happy with the web designer they had, so i backed it all up and moved it, only to find it was totally hacked, the worst i have seen, to the point of "throw it away and start again" but i had to deal with it, as i dug deeper and deeper into the site to find the hack, which had back doors, i finally fixed it, all the software and malware i used was not picking up the dodgy files, so i used chris burgess's advice which is " look for the date last modified" which is slow but helpful and eventually lead me to the problem files.
i also found a user had been hacked and that was another entry point to put in dodgy posts and links, the site was sending out 500 emails a minute ! there was also hidden posts to p#rn sites and hidden files with java scripts.
but when i finally felt i had fixed it , MANY images no longer existed? so then i went deeper and found that the image paths were to the past designers own root so actually NEVER existed on the domain !!!! a weird way of doing things, so the path to an image was www.designer.com/3.jpg instead of www.clients-domain/3.jpg
so my back up NEVER had all the files, hindsight is the best site but i just didn't think someone would be stupid enough to do that ! anyway i got lucky and "way back when" had all the images stored.
i hope that helps someone in the future.
tim
