Being the resident computer expert in the family, I found myself over at my father-in-law’s house yesterday with the purpose of ridding his home PC from the icy cold grip of a few computer viruses. What I had hoped would be a quick process turned into a lengthy and frustrating procedure that lasted until the next day. Eventually I had to wipe the operating system from the computer without the ability to make a backup first.
This got me to thinking about how so many people are open to the same kind of thing with their blogs or websites. I’m not referring to viruses infecting websites; I’m referring to not having backups in case the worst-case scenario was to suddenly rear its ugly head. If the server hosting your website was to crash and your entire site’s data was lost, would you be prepared for something like that?
Let me give you another real world example of this. About 2 years ago when I was working for a company that operated an online business selling wholesale sunglasses (that link is not them, but a new site I’m starting), we outsourced some of our blog work to this one guy in India. While we continued to provide the content for our blogs, he handled the management and hosting of a few of the blogs. One day there was a server crash and the database and files were lost and then we were informed that he had not kept any database or file backups and neither had the hosting company!
Understandably, we were not happy. One of the blogs had been established for a couple of years and had a couple hundred posts attached to it. It became my job to rebuild the blog to its former self and I had to do this from Google’s cache of the site. It took several really long days, but I was able to recreate most of the blog’s content from what Google had cached.
If you want to avoid the stress and heartache that comes with the loss of your entire website, then you need to be diligent in keeping backups of your entire site. If you run a blog (and you really should), then that means backing up files AND the database. Fortunately, it’s really not difficult to backup your files as needed.
If you’re hardcore, you can manually backup your files and database as often as needed. This is the way I do my backups, but just because I do it this way doesn’t mean you have to do it this way. There are several plugins available with WordPress that can assist you in backing up your necessary files.
If you backup your WordPress site manually like me, then the only files you really need to backup are your wp-content folder. This folder contains your theme files, images used in posts, and all your plugin files. If you were to lose all your files, these are the only ones you would need to recreate your site to its original splendor.
To backup a database manually, I just navigate to the site’s PHPMyAdmin area, select the database, export the file and save it to my computer. With the files from the wp-content folder and the database SQL file I am able to recreate my WordPress site if the unthinkable were to happen.
If you choose to use a plugin for your backup needs (and there is absolutely nothing wrong with this) then you have a few to choose from. Here are a few of the more popular ones:
- WP-DB-Backup
- DBC Backup
- WP S3 Backups
- eFiles Backup
- WordPress Backup
- WordPress EZ Backup
- WordPress Automatic Online Backup
Personally, if I were to use a plugin I would choose the WordPress Backup plugin, as it backs up the database as well as images, plugins and theme folders.
It is important to remember that if you only backup the database with your WordPress blogs and try to restore a site with them, then any posts or pages that call for an image will have no pictures to accompany them. The database will fill the posts with the original text, but it will call for images that are no longer there (unless you backed them up and restored them as well!)
I know this is a rather brief overview on backing up a WordPress site, but if you have any questions or tips feel free to use the comment section to address them.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
What is really great is your writing style, I normally hit the back button before the first paragraph but you kept me interested
Linda, you just made my day. I tend to think that I write like a 5th grader with a learning disability, but you just made me feel all good about myself again!
Rob, after today’s ordeal, I grabbed some leftovers for lunch and sat down to do some surfing. Looking at your website , I see that recent events have been immortalized! I can tell you that without your help, I would have been reduced to an incoherent babbling shadow of my once much larger self- image. Thanks for being there, need to go now– my cave is cold and I must find sticks to rub together!!