Scheduled Backup Of Your WordPress Blog
The most important thing you should do to protect your WordPress blog is to have a backup strategy. Whether it is automated or you have the discipline to do it manually, backing up your WordPress blog should be done on a regular basis.
The most important thing to backup on a regular basis is the database, that is what holds the actual content or posts. At least once a week I get contacted by someone who lost their WordPress blog only to find the database is gone and they have no backup to restore it. If this happens to you and you have no backup you might get lucky and ask your hosting account if they have a backup that they can restore for you. I did a recent post how to manually Backup The WordPress Database. In this post I will show you how to use a plugin to schedule an automated database backup. 
The plugin is called WP-DBManager and it has a few more options than previous database plugins I have used. Once installed and activated it adds it’s own Database module on the left side (if using WordPress version 2.7+). Expanding the Database module will give you various sub menus. You can view the settings and the tables, manually backup the database, repair, restore and drop tables from the database. I will warn you that messing with some of the Empty/Drop Tables settings can be dangerous if you don’t know what you are doing! The menu that we are most concerned about for this post is the DB Options menu. That is where you can configure the plugin for automatic scheduling. Once in the options menu scroll down and select how often you want the backup to run and the email address you want it sent to. I suggest to choose the Gzip option to keep the size of the file as small as possible. Under that is another option to schedule the database to be optimized on a regular as well. The other thing to have a backup of are the plugins, uploads folder and the themes. The plugins really don’t need backed up often if at all. That is more of a convenience so you don’t need to remember what ones you were using and download them all again. The themes are a little more critical only if you have a custom theme or have edited any of the files on your current theme. The uploads folder is a little more critical if you upload images into posts on regular basis. The uploads folder is where all the image files are stored by default, unless you changed that option. I suggest just backing up the entire wp-content folder where all of these files are stored. To do that you will need an FTP client like FileZilla and connect to your site with it. Using FileZilla, browse to the WordPress files, right click the wp-content folder on the right side and choose download into the backup folder on your computer.
Once you have the whole wp-content folder backed up, then all you need to backup on regular basis is the uploads folder. The uploads folder is within the wp-content folder. Browse to it and then right click it to save it to your computer.
Now you can keep drilling further down into the uploads folder and only backup just the current year.
Or you can even drill further down into the year and just choose to backup a month.
Whatever backup strategy you choose is up to you, but not having one is a very dangerous strategy.
Similar Posts:
- Backup WordPress Database
- Change Color Of Links In A WordPress Theme
- How To Upload Plugins WordPress Guide
- WordPress Post Navigation Looks Bad On Single Pages
- WordPress Guide To Writing A WordPress Post
If you liked this post, feel free to leave a comment that is relevant to the post or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Sorry but due to the spamming of a few all comments are moderated and will appear when approved and all drive-by comments will be deleted!
Comments
very useful
especially with all the downtime/problems you get with those pesky freehosts
Reply
HI it is very useful information for anyone which share by u thanx for it.
Reply
Very nice guide cheers
Reply
A really great post here. I assume there’s a chance to post more about related theme here. Really great. Thank you.
Reply
For some reason, I didn’t even think that you COULD back up a blog! I’ll have to read your directions on how to do that, and start doing it! Thanks for the valuable information!
Reply
I could really use this now. My hosting company does backups but it is a little difficult getting restores from them. With this database backup my blog is portable. Thanks !!
Reply
Good article. But i prefer http://www.mysqldumper.de/en/. It´s really easy to install and works perfect. Also backup via cronjobs is possible! I guess you can imagine, how precious this tool is for daily work…
Reply
I never thought of that! I’ll have to start backing up my blog! Thanks for the information.
Reply
this is a very helpful post. im new to wordpress. i need this.
Reply
this is an interesting article. im really new to word press so this is a good read.
Reply
great info! i think i really had never thought about backing up my info since it was online, but i think you may be right, thanks for the advice.
Reply
Ugg..thanks for the reminder. I need to set up scheduling. I am horrible with backing things up. You would think I’d learn after getting caught without a recent backup in the past.
Reply
Fantas.. it is really cool idea for create a backup of our wordpress blog thanks for sharing it.
Reply
i may have missed it in your post, but does the WP-DBManager plugin allow for automatically scheduled backups or do you have to manually run it when you want.
Reply
Jeff Replied:
April 1st, 2009 at 12:59 pm
Yes you missed it by just reading the title and not the entire post. You can schedule the backup to be emailed to you.
Reply
Using FileZilla, the work becomes so easy. It is a good idea to backup the wordpress blogs. Thanks for the awesome information and guidance.
Reply
Backup is vital but it needs to be painless otherwise people just do it less often (which defeats the purpose, your backup should not really be older than a couple of days ago).
And backup is just part one. Restore is part two. How easy is it to rebuild your site? You should rehearse a backup/restore on a test site.
Reply
i glad found your post, i had no backup before, now i have. Thanks to you.
Reply
I have a wordpress blog on my site, thanks for the backup advice.
Reply
Always ask your host if THEY have a backup procedure first and list the details and how often they backup data. Most hosts don’t bother and leave it to their customers to backup which isn’t ideal because remote backups are time-consuming especially if you have large amounts of data.
Reply
Using FileZilla, the work becomes so easy. It is a good idea to backup the wordpress blogs. Thanks for the awesome information and guidance
Reply
I’m glad I found your post, I didn’t realize you could do this.
Reply
I used to take mysql backups, optimize and repair the tables from my cPanel account. Now that I know about the Wordpress database backup plugin it will be much easier.
Thanks
Reply
Filezilla seems easier for me. Backing up the blogs/websites is a must. It happened to me once; I lost my website pages because of virus. And unfortunately I did not have the files in my computer. Well it’s a big lost to start again from zero. A lesson learned.
Reply
I’m glad I found this – the thought of losing all my blog so quickly near on reduces me to tears!
Nikki
Reply
WordPress database backup creates backups of your core WordPress tables as well as other tables of your choice in the same database.
Reply
Top advice.
What would be very useful is a backup plug-in that backed up the database and all of the user generated content (images, custom templates etc) and zipped the whole lot up into a single backup file. With a matching restore option this would make the whole process a 1 step operation.
Anyone know of such a plug-in?
Reply
As a Wordpress user, i really need this information about backup strategy for future use. Thanks for tips!
Reply
I’m glad I found your post, I didn’t realize you could do this
Reply
Back up are so important. Do it today and you won’t have to say ” I should have”
Reply
I usually prefer manual backups as I have more control, but again automatic backups can save huge time…
Reply
Leave a comment
Drive-By comments will be deleted! Like "Thanks for sharing", "Nice post", or any other text that doesn't contribute to the discussion. If you ask a very specific question about your particular WordPress theme, it will probably be deleted. I can fix your WordPress site but for a price. If you ask a question like "Why don't my blog work right", it will be deleted. If you ask a question about your WordPress site without a leaving a link to it, it will be deleted. The point is to ask questions and or comment on the the actual content of the post, and to please use some common sense. All comments are moderated and will appear when approved. Thank you.