In the previous post I talked about Blog Maintenance and the importance of staying on top of those associated task.
In this article I share my technique for capturing backups of your database files on autopilot. Once set-up, you need only monitor the process to be certain that no failures have occurred.
Currently I have 5 sites being backed up automatically and the system has a 100% performance rating since it was setup about one year ago. Now let’s hope I didn’t ruin that success rate by mentioning it. 
As many of you know, Wordpress is the most popular blogging platform on the internet with it’s many features and plugins, all of which are designed to give you the best possible blog performance if installed and configured properly.
This article is written for users of WordPress but I feel certain that this technique will work for blogs on other platforms as well if the WP-DB-Backup plugin is in place.
Hopefully, you have some system in place, manual or otherwise to capture backups from your blog to quickly recover from any catastrophe, like a crash of your host’s server, or an accidental erasure of your SQL database, that may occur.
Have you a plan in place to recover?
Do you backup your blog and if so, how regularly is this performed?
These are critical questions that you better have some decent answers for. If you’ve never backed up your blog you are in serious danger of losing everything from the day you launched to date. OUCH!
This should be an extremely frightening thought for you, as every article you’ve written and the associated links and photos could be gone in a flash. Not to mention the comments from your readers, which you will never recover. Everything will be history.
So let’s get to the meat of the subject.
Automate the backup procedure
To make this task easy, I recommend that you automate the process by downloading and installing the WP-DB-Backup plugin. This plugin allows you to backup your WordPress database files and folders. This is critical to providing a worry-free environment. I find this to be a must-have tool for any blogger.
Your blog database contains all of the files, posts and comments, so it is extremely important that you protect this data. This backup should be executed each time you update your blog by adding new content or features.
Once installed, within your admin dashboard area, click on “Tools” then “Backup”. This will take you to the backup management page where you can scroll down to the “Scheduled Backup” section.
Here you can designate the frequency of the backups and have them emailed to a specific location. To prevent mixing these files with other email, I recommend a dedicated Gmail account for the sole purpose of capturing daily backups. Name the account something like “MyBlogBackups@gmail.com”. Gmail provides over 7 GB of storage space free, so you can perform daily backups for many months, a period of time that exceeds any point in time that you would want to restore to anyhow.
You can then check the email account a couple of times weekly just to be certain that things are executing as designed.
This is not the only method of backing up your blog, there is FTP (file transfer protocol) and of course the manual backup, but why bother with those techniques when you can automate?
With the use of two free tools your blog backup worries can be history.
Keep Blogging!
Jimi Jones Reply:
April 4th, 2010 at 2:28 am
That one is hard to figure, I am running the same set-up.
I would probably dump that plugin and download the replacement, giving that a try. The current one may have something going on in the code, just saying.
.-= Jimi Jones´s last blog ..Backup Your Blog Automatically =-.
[Reply]