Today I’m taking a look at a new cloud based system called SiteSync:

If your doing anything online you probably have a website (and if you don’t you really should get one). For many people working online (including myself) their business is centered around their site. Their site is how they get organic traffic. Its how they do reviews. Its how they build authority. Its how the build a retargeting list (from the organic visitors). Its how they make sales and do affiliate promotions, and if your like me and use a self hosted email system (such as my MailIt plugin) its how you send emails. Many people sooner or later find that their website is something that they just cant live without. If my website suddenly vanished it would not only break my heart to lose all of the work I put into it, it would be detrimental to my business.

Because your site (or sites) are so important the smart marketer backs up their websites regularly For myself, I open my FTP client up and download all the site files, and then open up cPanel, head  over to phpMYadmin and export the database. While this is indeed a viable way to backup your site it also comes with some problems. Its slow and time consuming. Also it requires me to actually remember to do it. Honestly a back up should be done at least once a week, however because its slow to download all my files and my database, and also frankly because I often just forget, in practice I only do it like once a month at best.

This where SiteSync comes into play. Its a cloud based software that will automatically backup your sites for you. You can do a one time backup, or you can set it to do scheduled backups at regular intervals automatically.

SiteSync integrates with several services such as Amazon and Google to store your data backups, but it also gives you 10gb of storage that you can use.

For my testing I just used the data storage that they provided. I used their storage for two main reasons: first 10gb is plenty and second I did not have an account to those other data storage services.

In order to create a backup for your site you need to add your site to your account. There are actually a few ways that this is done.

The two main ways are going to be to either enter FTP details or use the provided WordPress plugin. I have a WordPress site so I went with the plugin.

To use the plugin you just download the plugin, install it on your site, and then enter your unique HASH that is provided in SiteSync (the part I have blacked out in the graphic above). Once you do this SiteSync will automatically find your site and add it into your account. Honestly it could not be easier than that.

Next you select how often you want to do your backups.

For my first test I did a one time backup. This is good for testing, however the real power of a service like this is that you can schedule it to do regular backups. I actually suggest weekly backups. This way your site is always protected and at most you lose only a weeks worth of data. If you have a rally active site then you can do daily or if you have a kind of slow site you can do monthly though.

There is one final step, but that final step is just confirmation. Really thats it. Once you link up  your site and select your blackup frequency your good to go and you can rest assured knowing that your site is protected.

Now if the time ever comes that you have to restore your site you have two options. You can enter FTP details and have SiteSync automatically restore your site for you, or you can download a .zip file of your backups and do it your self (you can actually download the .zip anytime). Downloading the zip file is where I found a bug in the system. When I tried to download my file I got an error which I reported to the vendors:

The error ended up being that my WordPress site was actually in a sub directory. Because of this the URL had an extra backslash in it (/) which was causing issues. It did not bother me to much that this bug existed. As a software developer I know for sure that its nearly impossible to write a modern software that is 100% bug free. However I should mention that I was super impressed by the vendors response. There where no excuses, no blow offs, just action. They listened to my feedback, duplicated the issue, found the bug and fixed it all with in a few hours. Very cool, and even more impressive when you consider that I am in a different time zone than they are and it was around 1am their time when I was messaging them.

Other than this one bug that was quickly squashed the only other thing I did not like about SiteSync was the interface. I found it to be clunky. The navigation uses menu’s and sub menues. Some of which goes 3 levels deep. The menu titles sometimes make no sense: for example you view and add sites in the ‘settings’ menu (which should probably be named ‘my sites’). There are also menu items all the way at the bottom of the screen for some reason, which I initially did not even notice until I got on a Skype chat with the vendor. I reported the concerns I had to the vendor and he agreed that it might  need some fine tuning and indicated he would be willing to do this.

Over all I found SiteSync to be straight forward and easy to use. Its also a very useful software. Having backups of your sites just makes sense for the same reason you have fire insurance on your house. You don’t think about it until you need it, but when you do need it your damn glad that you have it. SiteSync makes it super easy to do regular automatic backups of your site that insure one of the most valuable assets you can have in your online business is always safe. My final verdict on this one was easy:

 A quick note about the reviews I do on this site. The product vendors give me access to their products for free in order for me to do my review. However I make no promises to them regarding the results of my tests or what I will write in my review. Should you click a link that takes you to a sales page for a paid product for sale this link will be an affiliate link and I will be paid a percentage of the sales price should you decide to invest in it.

About the Author

Brett Rutecky

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Brett Rutecky is a full time online marketer, web developer, and entrepreneur. He has developed scores of Facebook apps, dozens of custom web sites and hundreds of scripts.

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