Backups – They can save your bacon

Monday, June 7th, 2010 at 2:48 pm

Well yesterday I skipped the soap box for my rant because of being thankful. Today it is a time for reminders that we tend to skip.

If 10 minutes from now your web server crashed because the hard drive died and your host did not have backup files would you be okay?

The first part actually happened to me with a hard drive getting fried on the server I was on but my host had backups so I had to do nothing but wait.

But what if they didn’t have a backup?

At the point I was a brand new blogger and had been blogging for about 2 months. I had spent hours tweaking out the look of the blog (this was before WordPress) but I had done it all through cpanel.

I was new enough to blogging that I did not even use FTP at that point. Boy was I ever lucky. Part of that was having a good host too.

But as a long term member of the Murphy club (you know anything that can go wrong will) I now make sure that I have everything backed up.

Lets go over what you need to recover from a catastrophe like this with your WordPress blog.

Step one you will need a backup of your data base. The easiest way to do this is with a plugin. (WP Data Base Backup) I have it email me a copy every day to a special Gmail account. You do need to check the account to make sure it is actually happening. Monday is the day I check that account and make sure it is receiving a copy from all of my blogs,

I keep a backup of all the files in my wp-content/uploads folder too. Once a week I back that up. That has all of your images and audio/video files you have uploaded.

Finally I keep a current set of my theme files on my computer. This has all of the edits I have made to the theme.

That is the minimum you need to backup. There is no need to keep plugins (unless you have edited them or they are premium ones) or the actual WordPress software unless you want to have everything in one place.

If you have those pieces as soon as your server is fixed you can get things back together. Hopefully you never need to do this but if you ever do you will be glad that you have them. After all Murphy doesn’t live just at my house .

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy.

After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably.

If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.