How to Easily Backup a Wordpress Blog

20 Aug, 2007 | Written by John | under Blog Basics

If you've ever had the unfortunate experience of losing some important data on your computer through either a system crash or hard drive failure you will know from first hand experience how important it is to have backups of your most important work, software programs and even the family photos you have stored on your pc. Having backups of your blog is also vitally important as i'm sure you can imagine how devastating it would be if you were to lose all the files stored on your blogs server…

Firstly i want to show you how easy it is for you to automate the process of backing up your wordpress blog which also includes automating an email to be sent to you that contains all the latest files on your blogs server. In a later post i will show you how to backup your blogger blog…

How to Easily Backup a Wordpress Blog

Install Wordpress Backup Plugin

Firstly you need to download and install the wordpress database backup plugin from here wordpress backup plugin Extract the files contained within the downloaded zip file and upload them to /wp-content/plugins/ folder on your blogs server. Next you need to activate the plugin through the plugin menu. If you've installed the plugin correctly you should see the wordpress database plugin towards the bottom of your already installed plugin list. Simply click activate and then follow the below instructions: source

How to Use Wordpress Database Backup Plugin

1. Click the Manage menu in your WordPress admin area.
2. Click the Backup sub-menu.
3. The plugin will look for other tables in the same database. You may elect to include other tables in the backup.
** NOTE ** Including other tables in your backup may substantially increase the size of the backup file!
This may prevent you from emailing the backup file because it’s too big.
4. Select how you’d like the backup to be delivered:

* Save to server : this will create a file in /wp-content/backup-*/ for you to retrieve later
* Download to your computer : this will send the backup file to your browser to be downloaded
* Email : this will email the backup file to the address you specify

5. Click “Backup!” and your database backup will be delivered to you.
The filename of the backup file will be of the form
DB_prefix_date.sql

* DB = the name of your WordPress database, as defined in wp-config.php
* prefix = the table prefix for this WordPress blog, as defined in wp-config.php
* date = CCYYmmdd_B format: 20050711_039
* the “B” is the internet “Swatch” time.
* See the PHP date() function for details.

As you can see from the above instructions it's pretty simple setting up this excellent wordpress backup plugin and i can't stress enough how important it is to have a fresh backup of your prized blog should anything drastic happen on your blogs server where you could lose what could be your entire business!