Guide to Backing Up Wordpress Blogs

Importance of Backing Up your Wordpress Blog

Backing up your wordpress or any other blog is very important. There a many reasons and problems than can happen and ruin months or years of work. Avoid all of this and back up regularly. Many web hosts provide free backups but it is still preferable to have your own backups stored on your local drive. To be able to back up with ease you have to learn how to do the following.

Complete backup vs Quick Backup

Wordpress runs on a database that stores all blog posts, pages, links and settings. A full backup consists of the database plus files from your site such as, theme, plugins, images, media.

Backing up only blog posts and comments is possible by exporting and xml document from your Wordpress admin panel. Click on manage then on export tab. You will be prompted to save a file to your local drive. You can then import this file from your new Wordpress blog.

Manual Database Back Up

In order to manually backup your database, you have to login to your control or cPanel and access your database through phpMyAdmin. Once logged in to your database navigate to Export tab. You should be on this page: (click image to view larger)

Scroll down and check save as file box. Keep this file in a safe place. It is your database dump.

Manual Backup of Files

Now you need the rest of your files. Usually copying /wp-content/ will be enough because this folder contains your themes, plugins and uploads.

To download a copy of this folder either use Filezilla a free ftp client or Smartftp. If you have a cPanel login and download a home directory backup, your database backup, or any thing else you might want.

Wordpress Backup Plugins

These plugins will automatically backup Worpress core files. I have never backed up this way but I know from reading and from friends that Ilfilosofo have a popular backup plugin.

Use

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 retreive 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.When having the database backup emailed or sent to your browser for immediate download, the backup file will be deleted from the server when the transfer is finished. Only if you select delivery method “Save to server” will the backup file remain on your server.

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