Google Knol. Remember that little fella? Well its an epic failure. To be honest, the concept sucks! Google does have some neat stuff, but how on earth did they think of Knol?

Anyone can write a knol and publish it, right? Now that’s good. People are sharing their knowledge. But, the problem is that its not very user-friendly. Its not the type of site you would go to if you needed some info.

I searched for “SEO” there and it came up with 976 knols. Fuck me! 976! Would you go through all of them and see which one has the best info? I wouldn’t. And it would be like trying to find a needle in a stack of needles if you wanted to get the best knol about SEO.

What’s the difference between a blog post and Knol? I don’t see a difference. Wikipedia on the other hand is a place where people come togather and share what they know. Its just one big page full of info. Everything is in there. You don’t need to dig through hundreds of page to find what you need. Its all infront of you.

And do you think people who write Knols are doing it because they wanna share their knowledge? No. Well maybe some. Most of us are doing it for backlinks and traffic. Its a bit spammy to be honest. But, that doesn’t mean you won’t find some quality content here and there.

I don’t think Knol will be popular. Right now, the average joe doesn’t even know about it. And most of the geeks forgot about it. Its pretty much dead from the beginning. Well who cares if its an epic failure? We can still use it for SEO “purposes”.

Yeah you gotta backup your sites and you have to do it properly. You need to do more than just saving it on your computer. I’ll tell you how I do it.

Making the backup

1. I download all the files and databases to your computer.
2. I zip everything and put a password on it. I use WinRAR to do this.
3. Name the .zip file to something like “wr_oct-5.zip”. (Make sure you have the date on it!)
4. I make sure that the .zip file isn’t corrupted by unzipping it and checking if everything is there.

Storing the backup

The biggest mistake I ever made was keeping all the backups on my laptop only and forgetting that someone could steal my laptop or my hard drive could crash. Please don’t do that or else you’ll get fucked! Trust me!

I started putting my backups on three different places. This way I’m safe if something goes wrong.

My server: Yes, my server itself. I make a folder where I just keep all the backups. Make sure you keep this folder at the root of your server where it can’t be accessed by the public.

On a CD: The old school way! I have a bunch of blank disks lying around, so why not burn the backups on it? Plus its not that expensive to buy blank CDs. Or if you want, you can just put them on a pen drive.

Online storage: I put one more copy on Windows Live SkyDrive. Don’t just trust any site with your precious little backups! Meaning don’t use shit like RapidShare and Megaupload.

How often do I backup?

The best way would be to backup everyday. But, that’s not possible. I’m just way too lazy to do that. I try to do it weekly. And sometimes randomly when I feel like doing it.

Some shared hosts back your stuff up daily, so consider yourself lucky if you’re on a shared hosting.

How about YOU?

Tell us how you do it! I wanna know how often you do it, where you store it and if you have any suggestions for us.