Since my blog suffered a catastrophic failure a few weeks back causing me to rebuild everything from scratch, I have put in place a few measures to ensure that if such an event occurs again that I will be much better prepared and be back online much quicker than it originally took me.
Over the past few weeks I have had several people ask me about the experience and how I went about backing up my blog, so I’ve decided to write up a quick post on backing up WordPress, or more-so provide one possible WordPress Backup Strategy.
WordPress Backup Strategy Part 1 – Export WordPress data
One of the most easiest and quickest ways to backup WordPress is to use the in-built Data Export function. Exporting WordPress data ensures that you capture all posts, pages, comments,categories and tags in your blog into an XML file which is small in size and very easy to store on your local computer.
How To Export WordPress data
I made a quick video on just how easy it is to do this, check it out -
WordPress Backup Strategy Part 2 – WP-DB-Backup Plugin
The WP-DB-Backup Plugin allows you to easily backup your core WordPress database tables. The WP-DB-Backup Plugin also allows you to backup other data tables such as:
- Comment meta
- Ping lists
- Email capture files
The WP-DB-Backup Plugin also offers three different ways to Backup WordPress:
- Save to server
- Download to your computer
- Email backup to a email address (with Backup Scheduling)
How To Setup and Backup WordPress data
I also made a quick video on just how easy it is to do this, check it out -
I suggest that you set up a scheduled backup and have the backup emailed out to a email address that you setup specifically for backups. Once a week should suffice unless you post daily or make frequent changes to your content.
Obviously there are many more way that you can go about backing up your WordPress blog, however this is one way that I believe many can quickly and easily implement a WordPress Backup Strategy to ensure that if the inevitable does occur, you can be back up and running in no time.
Stay tuned for my upcoming post’s in the WordPress Backup 101 series:
- How to organize your new WordPress Blog backups
- How to use your new backups to restore your WordPress Blog
Cemil Ozcelik
www.OnlineBusinessBlackbook.com © 2009 - 2010
If you like this post, you might also like:
If you found this page useful, why not use the social media buttons above to add it on your favorite social sites and also
subscribe to the RSS feed for more interesting posts from Online Business Blackbook.
Also Check Us Out On Facebook and
Twitter
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Cemil, Sad to hear that you suffered a catastrophic failure. Thanks for sharing your lessons learnt so that we can all avoid a crash happening to us. I’ve set a Google Alert to backup my files once a week. You successfully nudged and prodded me into action.
You have gone to a lot of trouble here thanks for the input i will follow your lead. Cheers again for the help.
Useful info. Cemil – it can be very frustrating losing something you’ve put a lot of effort into, not to mention costly if your site is generating income.
Hey Cemil – I’v e added this plugin to all my websites. One question, if I elect to have back up sent to an email (as you suggest) how big is the file? and I guess it’s best to get in the habit of deleting previous back ups? Thank you!!
Hi Jan,
The size of the file really depends on the number of posts and pages that you have on your blog (both published and draft) and the number of words, characters, etc used. My backups are currently about half a MB, and while this will grow over time many ISP’s and Webmail providers give very generous email storage limits these days so you will be hard pressed to run out of space
As far as deleting previous backups, if you are backing up once a week, perhaps clean out your mailbox of the old backups every 6 months or so, otherwise maybe more frequently if you are performing daily backups.
Thanks everyone for your feedback. Just wanted to share my experience and hopefully help others out there avoid such a painful situation.
Hi Cemil. Backing up is important to do and easy to put off, but thanks to your prompting I’ve now got the plugin installed and have scheduled wordpress backups running. Gotta love automation.
Looking forward to your next posts on this topic, particularly how to restore a blog from a wordpress backup (just in case!).
{ 1 trackback }