This is an interesting post, towards the end of what has been very interesting 10 days. I have had several people come to me with a problem of their site being hacked. When you visit their hacked site, you will see a replacement index page installed by a hacker, calling himself Q8Coder, probably from the country Kuwait. Q8-Kuwait- get it?
A website hacked by Q8coder is not the end of the world, if you move quickly to fix the problem.
Understandably you as the site owner would not be impressed that this has happened. It is imperative that you move immediately to correct the problem. Every day that passes is costing you, in terms of positive ranking signals.
You need to assess the damage- and correct what needs fixing. A hacked website is severe blow to your search engine rank credibility and just a few days can do major damage if left unchecked.
Of course, an effective backup strategy would minimise your web site down time- by way of enabling you to restore the site to the full functionality of the backed up copy. Keep three working backups of your site- don’t keep them all on the one drive, or in the one location.
Website backups should not be kept in a sub directory of the website. If the site goes down, the sub directories will go down too- don’t put all your eggs in the one basket and leave yourself at the mercy of the elements.