You work hard on your blog, don’t you? Yes.
Do you keep it updated with content? Yes.
Do you promote it on a regular basis? Yes.
Do you backup your blog? No? Why not?
What if all that content and work you put into your blog just vanished?
That would suck, wouldn’t it? Maintaining your blog backups are just as important as producing great content for it.
The Basics
For me, I host my own WordPress blog from WordPress.org. There are two things you need to back up on your WordPress blog:
- The data – This would include your database and everything in it like your settings and your content.
- Everything else – Things like your theme, graphics and plugins.
WordPress has a built in export feature that is great for a basic data backup. This feature will backup all your posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories and tags. To do the export, follow these steps:
- Login to your WordPress control panel.
- On the left menu, under tools, click on export.
- Make sure Restrict Author is set to All Authors.
- Click on the Download Export File button.
- Save the .xml file to your hard drive for save keeping.
Ok, you now have your data but what about everything else? For this we can just download the files in one shot:
- Get a FTP client such as CyberDuck or FileZilla.
- Connect to your web host with your FTP client.
- Navigate to your WordPress content directory on the server. The path might look like: /yourusername/public_html/yoursitename/wp-content.
- To make things simple, just download the entire wp-content directory to your computer.
Beyond the Basics
Now if you are tech savvy, I have a few more options for you:
- WordPress plugin – WP-DBManager is a great plugin that automates the backup of the blog database. It can even email the backup to you when it’s done. Just download the plugin, install it and setup the options for your database backups.
- phpMyAdmin – Most hosting companies provide you with a set of tools to manage your hosting environment. One of those tools is the: phpMyAdmin web console for MySQL. Using this tool, you can create a database backup and download it straight to your computer. Refer to your hosting provider for more instructions.
- All the Other Files – To get all your other files, you can write a script to automate the download. In UNIX or Windows, you can write a script that logs in to the server, downloads the wp-content directory to your computer and disconnects. If you are familiar with UNIX, you can set up rsync for full and incremental backups.
Backup your blog at least once a week, if not more. Each option I have given you will cost you nothing but time.
See there?
You have no excuses now.
I have given you the tools. Take action and get to it!
Photo Credit: iconoclast
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