Backing Up A WordPress Site

Posted on 21. Apr, 2009 by Shawn Ramsey in WordPress

If you are not backing up your website/database, then you could be setting yourself up to lose it all. There are a number of variables that can cause you to lose everything that you have ever uploaded to your website. Maybe you pissed off a hacker, your little sister deleted every post you have while you got up to make a PB&J sandwich or even some crazy act of God causes everything to go bye bye. Murphy’s law is nothing to joke about when it comes to your unique content.

Luckily WordPress users have an easy way to setup and begin receiving backups regularly. The WP-DB-Backup plugin makes backing up your site extremely easy. It has the option to backup hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, or whenever you wish. The backup can be downloaded straight to your computer or sent to you via email in a zipped format.

You can get the plugin one of two ways download and unzip into wordpress from the plugin site, or do a search for it while logged into WordPress by going to Plugins>Add New>search for “backup”>choose the WP-DB-Backup and install.

Here is how to get started once it has been installed:

1. Once installed, go to Tools>Backup

You will now see a list of all of the directories that will be backed up. You will also see 4 other options wp_redirection_groups, wp_redirection_items, wp_redirection_logs and wp_redirection_modules to the right that are optional, go ahead and check the radio buttons on these as well.

2. You have three options for receiving your back up a.) Save to Server, b.) Download to Your Computer and c.) Email Backup to. I like to use the “Email Backup to:” option so that after downloading from my email, there is still a copy stored within my online email as well. After you have made your decision, go ahead and create a Backup now!

The options look like this:

3. You also have the option to create a scheduled backup. Depending on how often you upload to your site, it is a good idea to go ahead and set this up as well. Just choose the appropriate options and click Schedule Backup.

It will look like this:

That’s all that there is to it. You can now rest comfortably knowing that a complete backup of your database is sitting on your computer safe and sound. As with all backups you should have three copies, one on your home computer, one on an external hard-drive and one off site somewhere (within an online email account will work). Hope this helps.