Life is full of unexpectation. Same thing applies to your blog. You can’t expect your blog to live well without having a single problem for years. There are lots of chances that will kill your blog immediately. Should your server crash for some reasons, or your blog get hacked, you will lose valuable data.
Creating backups of your WordPress blog is like eating 3 meals a day. It’s an important action to protect your blog. We should do it on a regular basis but of course, we don’t need to backup your blog so frequent as eating. Backup your blog weekly is a minimum requirement but I do recommend you to backup daily, especially if you publish content frequently. Personally, I do the backup daily.
With the backup in hand, you can recover or restore your blog easily if there is any disaster happens to your blog. You will still lose some of the data after backup but not all.
Database Backup vs Full Backup
Many people are just thinking about database backup when come to WordPress backup. They’re just forgotten about the file backup such as your themes, your plugins, your images and video.
WordPress is running on a MySQL database, the world’s most popular open source database. This is the place to store all of your blog posts, pages, links, and all of your settings. Creating backup of MySQL database on a regular basis is very important, but is not enough.
The full backup consists of not only database backup but also file backup which includes all of your WordPress core files, admin panel files, your theme files, your plugins files, images, video and etec. Although some of you might think that this is not so important compared to database backup. But I do recommend you do the full backup regularly because once you lose your images or video file, it is unlikely you will find them back.
Manual Backup vs Automatic Backup
There are 2 ways to backup your blog, manual backup and automatic backup. Manual backup is the backup process carried out by ourselves manually through the use of cPanel, FTP client, WordPress plugins or command. Automatic backup is the backup process carried out by the script or WordPress plugins triggered by the scheduler automatically.
Many of us simply prefer automatic backup instead of manual backup due to the complexity of the manual backup. From my point of view, manual backup is good for those who would like to learn technical stuffs and get familiarize with WordPress and web server. In addition, every time when we upgrade or install new plugin and theme, it is better if can arrange a full manual backup of the WordPress blog to prevent any loss of data.
As to the date of writing, I haven’t seen any WordPress plugins that will help you to do file backup as part of the full backup. We can do it using FTP client and download all the files in the server but it’s time consuming. If you know any of it, please kindly share with us in the comment below.
Conclusion
Now you should know the importance of backup your WordPress blog. Hopefully you can put these tips to good use on your blogs. In my subsequent post, I will talk about manual backup and automatic backup in details. Stay tuned!
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Very good advice, just like we need to back up our important emails, programs, documents and web site files it is good to get in the practice of backing up your wordpress blogs. I have had, in eleven years, three total computer wipe outs and if I had not learned to BACK IT ALL UP I would be out of business!
Jan Tallent
we follow each other on twitter, which we both recommend
http://twitter.com/jantallent
You are correct, manual backup is the best way, more over plugin backup has many security holes, what i do is open up my phpmyadmin select export and export it as gzip, and for the files as i have dedicated server i don have problem i zip it all and downalod using ftp
for those who doesnt have zip or rar functionality can use any ftp client and downalod whole dir