If you're a seasoned developer or webmaster, you certainly have protocols in place for protecting your work, from daily backups to fail over servers. If you're a designer or site administrator, your back-ups are managed by your hosting provider or system administrator; you probably don't think much about back-ups on a daily basis.

However, with any complex configuration, a failure or mistake can still lead to hours and hours of lost time. Daily system backups are only good for what was done up to the time the backup was made. If you've worked with us in these first two chapters, you've already made a significant number of changes and configurations that, if you had to go back to yesterday's system backup, could take you hours to re-create.

We like to have backups, backups, and more backups, all along the way. Without interfering with how your systems are backed up, allow us to suggest some hard-learned strategies for working with Magento.