End of the month when was the last time you backed up your blog?
Got a tweet yesterday which I promptly retweeted from CaptnAffiliate (someone you should follow if you are a marketer.)
@CaptnAffiliate: If you haven’t backed up your blogs recently, this is as good a time as any to do it!
It served as a good reminder and that is the reason for the post. My programmer does ours each week. This means we lose at most a week of blog posts if something goes wrong on the server.
There are two different ways to back up WordPress and which one YOU should use depends on how many plugins you have and how much tweaking you have done.
The easy way is to use the built in exporter in WordPress. This is quite easy to do just login and go to Tools – Export
Click the Download Export File and save it to your computer. (I have a separate folder just for blog backups so I can find them easily.)
This is the easy way but…
Yes there is always a but it only keeps your post content. If you are using a bunch of plugins or a complex theme like Flexibility that has various settings you have not saved all of those items.
The first way will give you your content but all of your settings are gone if you ever have to redo your blog. That is why I pull the actual data base for the blog. This will have all of the information on your settings and if you need to reinstall it you keep all of the settings changes you have made that are data base driven.
To save your data base I have started using a plugin called WordPress Data Base Backup (it will be added to the Power WordPress Users set on Monday) as it is easier to use for most than just exporting the data base through PHPMyAdmin. Once the plugin is installed just click Tools – Backup.
Then pick the additional tables you want to download (I grab them all but you can and should skip any stats data base as they can be huge and are not necessary for getting your blog back in case of catastrophe) by checking the boxes while holding the shift key.Then click 
Check the download to your computer then click Backup now!
Save that file to your computer where you can find it and you are done.
Now this plugin will allow you to schedule the data base to be emailed to you but I always do it manually and save it to my computer so I know..
- That I have a good copy
- That is was actually done
Automation is great but it is too easy in my humble opinion to depend on that and God forbid you need it and something went wrong with the automation and you do not have a current backup. We back up once a week as part of our regular schedule of tasks. I have discussed your content and data bases here but you should also keep copies of any files you have edited such as your theme files. Just because you edited your header or footer of your theme in your dashboard you should always save a copy to your computer.
You can grab the basic theme files again easily but if you are like me and have editied your themes having a copy will save you having to do it again in case of catastrophe.
Which ever way you use, it is the end of the month and it is a good time to do your backup RIGHT NOW!
Hopefully this will be a total waste of your time and you will never ever need this backup but believe me, the one time that you do need this backup the time you spent doing it will be time well spent.
Mike Paetzold
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8 comments
Doug Champigny
Twitter: CaptnAffiliate
on May 31, 2009 at 12:04 pm
Thanks for pointing out the DB backup plugin Mike – I hadn’t seen that one. After Teri lost a hard drive with over 1,000 irreplaceable photos on it, we back everything up regularly, both online backups to our drives, then we backup the drives to external drives we then disconnect to prevent virii from getting to them.
Now we have an easy way to back up our WP installations too – thanks!
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Captain Affiliate on May 31, 2009 at 12:06 pm
Thanks for the reference, Mike – glad the tweet helped. With the post you’ve done here you’ve made it much more valuable – tweeting the link to this post now!
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Earl Netwal
Twitter: EarlNetwal
on May 31, 2009 at 5:06 pm
Thanks Mike. It seems I had uploaded the plug in and never activated it. I’m lazy and set it up to backup every week. I appreciate your approach to doing it manually, but this is the type of thing I could easily forget to do, for months.
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Andre Arnett on May 31, 2009 at 8:08 pm
This is great information and I for one will be listening and taking action. I have seen what not backing up your info can cause and I would advise everyone to think about doing the same. Thanks to you and Doug.
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Lonnie Minton on June 1, 2009 at 5:48 pm
Mike, thanks for referencing this plugin. I will be adding it to my WordPress plugin set as soon as I can.
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Lonnie Minton on June 1, 2009 at 5:54 pm
Mike, a second comment – a question. Do you choose all of the tables or which ones. What are the important ones? Thanks.
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Mike
Twitter: thewpmaven
Reply:
June 1st, 2009 at 5:57 pm
As I states all except for any stats tables because the size can be big and backup of stats is not necessary for getting the blog back in a crash.
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Jon Hansen on June 1, 2009 at 8:53 pm
Thank you Mike for the important reminder.
I just did a quick content back-up. How do I become a power user to do the more comprehensive back-up?
Jon Hansen
Note: I have a few questions with differences in format between Internet Explorer and FireFox (logos in EI are partly covered by the sidebar, while in FireFox they are not). Also font options when I cut and paste from Word are automatically converted to the same font and size in the actual blog. This just started to happen a couple of weeks ago.
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