2 Simple Ways To Backup Your WordPress Blog.

Creating backups on a regular basis is essential for your blog or any other kind of websites. Backing up your blog is especially important before and after you upgrade it. Your site can suddenly disappear due to server difficulties, hacks and other unforeseen circumstances and it is real tragic to see a blog vanish when you put hours and hours of your precious time in building it. If you are relying on your site for money then this really hurts the most.

You probably think that your hosting company is going to backup your essential files. A lot of hosting companies do offer backups but don’t ever rely on them. At the beginning of my blogging endeavor, I used to think the same way. Boy, I was wrong. After couple of months into blogging, all of a sudden my hosting company’s server crashed and just like that my blog was gone. Luckily, since I save all my articles in my computer’s hard drive, I had all my posts. But all the comments, themes, plugins, images, videos, settings files and most important of all, the time I invested in the blog was irreplaceable. I was pretty upset. Well, let’s say I learned my lesson the hard way.

It is my responsibility as a webmaster to keep all the backups for my blog. And today, to help you become a responsible webmaster, I am going to share with you 2 simple ways you can use to backup your WordPress blog.

1. Manual backup: WordPress Blogs are powered by MYSQL database. This database is where your blog’s settings and all your blog contents are stored. Without this database your blog does not exist. If you frequently publish contents, backing up this database is essential because if your hosting server ever crashes, there is no way you can restore your blog without the database backup. Many people don’t know that this database is separate from other WordPress files and to fully backup your blog, both the WordPress database and the WordPress files need to be backed up.

> Manually backup the WordPress database: Many web hosts have software to back up your site. This process involves logging on to your web host control panel and accessing the database through phpMyAdmin. The control panel of different hosts is different but in most popular hosts they are usually called cPanel or Direct Admin.

Once inside the control panel, click the link to MySQL database. Then click on phpMyAdmin to access it. This is what you use to manage and interact with your MySQL databases. Once inside phpMyAdmin, select the WordPress database and click on the Export tab. If the SQL is checked under the Export section, it takes you to a “Structure” section where you tick on the boxes as shown in the adjacent image.

After that, leave all the boxes on the “Data” section unchecked but make sure that the box right next to Data heading is checked. Then, scroll down and check on the ‘Save as file’ and click on GO button. This prompts you to download the file. If your database is big you can use the compression option. This is called your database dump and you need to be save it in a safe place like your computer’s hard drive.

> Manually backup your WordPress files: After saving the database dump, you need to save the rest of your files which contains themes, plugins, uploaded images, videos and settings files. Plus, you must back up all your files in WordPress directory, subdirectories and the .htaccess file. Usually your web host provides an area in the control panel where you can download your backup. However, it is best to download the files in your computer using FTP clients like Filezilla, SmartFTP, CrossFTP etc.

2. Creating backups using WordPress plugins: If you think the manual method of backing up your blog is too much of a hassle, then you can also use plugins. These plugins help you schedule and store your backups in a secure location like your computer, emails or other third party locations like Amazon S3.

Some of the popular plugins you can use are:

WordPress database backup: This backup plugin is pretty popular among WordPress users. This creates backup of your core WordPress tables as well as other tables of your choice in the same database.

This is simple and very easy to use. Simply visit the plugin menu in your WordPress administration area to install the plugin and activate it. Then, set it up to start your back up by clicking on ‘Backup’ menu under ‘Tools’ section.

You can save your backup to your server. This creates a file /wp-content/backup-*/ in your server, which you can retrieve later whenever necessary. You can also download the files in your computer or email it to the email address of your choice.

Online backup for WordPress: This is a cool new plugin I recently came across while searching for ways to backup my WordPress blog. There are many backup plugins available but they only backup to your own server or you email. This one is little different because it backs up your blog online automatically and for free. This service offers 50 MB space to save your data in a safe and secure location in the Backup technology server and the good thing about this is the backups rotate around.

This plugin backs your blog’s database, zips it and sends it to the online server. To use this plugin you need to create an account so that you can later login to retrieve the data if necessary. You can even schedule your backups and encryptions are allowed too if your server supports it. I have seen some other plugins available that backs up your data online but this one provides more space for free storage as well as cool scheduling options and a better backend.

The one disadvantage about this plugin is that it doesn’t backup the WordPress files. To backup the files, you have to use the manual method using FTP client.

Automatic WordPress backup: This is the backup system I use and I highly recommend it to every avid bloggers. This awesome tool for WordPress lets you backup your entire WordPress site – the database as well as the files. The backups are stored on Amazon S3 which is very reliable.

For a detailed step by step process of using this backup system for your WordPress blog, visit my article Why And How I Use Amazon S3 to backup my blog.

Some of the cool features include:

• Minimal downtime to restore your blog if tragedy strikes as the WordPress database as well as themes, plugins, uploaded files and settings files are all stored in one place.
• Just set it once and it automatically backs everything up. You can also manually trigger backups so, you have a peace of mind while upgrading your blog.
• This plugin is free but the only thing you have to pay is for the Amazon S3 storage. However, the storage space is very inexpensive. It only costs 15 cents to store and 15 cents to transfer 1 GB of data, which I think is well worth knowing that your blog is never going to vanish again.

NOTE: After you do your backup don’t forget to test it by retrieving your backups. This is to ensure if your site is really backed up without any problems.

So, What is your backup Plan?

Please, feel free to leave any comments if you have any questions or just want to contribute.

Here’s to your successful online endeavor!

-Adam Paudyal

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