You should back up your site on a regular basis to protect from server failure, human error, virus's, hackers the list goes on. It only takes about a minute and if you loose any work from not backing up the only one responsible is you.

I advise backing up at least once a week, before you install any components and if you have done a large amount of updating.

All of our sites come pre-installed with Akeeba, which in my opinion is the best backup component for Joomla. We'll already set it up for you so all you have to do is press a button.

To back up your site do the following

• go to Components > Akeeba Backup > Backup Now
• Press the big "Backup Now!" button

You will see it working through the backup Make sure you stay on the page until you get the Backup Completed Successfully message.

That's it.

All the hard work has been done for you. You might never need your backups but if you do you'll be glad you have them.

Restoring a site from backup doesn't take very long but having to sit down and redo a years work does.