Digital Musings

Written on November 16, 2007 – 8:00 pm | by Vikram |

Recently I had to face the nightmarish experience of a Server crash, which eventually resulted in the database corruption of the entire Blog and whenever I tried to open it in a browser, all I saw was an option to Reinstall WordPress?? RE-INSTALL WP?? What happened to all my posts, my theme,the plugins and all the comments? When I tried to reinstall it, I got a list of over a 100 database errors. It was a horrible experience. Many weeks of work vanished in a matter of seconds! I used to believe one has to experience something to understand its gravity, but I pray to God, none of you guys ever face a server crash.

I read a lot of Blogs and subscribe to quite a few, but I have seen this topic does not get the attention it deserves. Many bloggers are beginners and don’t have experience in maintaining their self hosted blogs. One is not always aware how shared hosting can be deceptive and you can lose your entire site in a server crash, so its of utmost importance that one backs up his work as often as possible, at least once a week. It is almost the only insurance one has.In this post I have covered the process of backing up your blog along with various resources, tools and services that can be useful in this process.

Any WordPress blog, consists of two important parts that need to be backed up separately. One is your actual blog, and other is the database. Its important to understand the difference between these two as both have a different method of backing up and they are incomplete without the each other.Some people just backup the database and think they don’t need to worry about anything, but thats not enough.

Your Blog + Your Blogs Database = Your Complete Site.

Your WordPress Blog consists of the following:

• Your WordPress Core Installation.
• Your WordPress Theme.
• Your Plugins.
• The images and files on your Blog.
• Various Scripts (Java scripts, php scripts etc) and static webpages.

Your WordPress Database consists of the following:

• Your Blog Posts.
• Your Blog Comments.
• Various data that is generated by different plugins. (like Akismet and WP Stats)

These two components together constitute your Blog. If you back up your blog and not the database then you would only get a blank theme and no content. And if you backup the database and not the theme, you would all your content but, the Theme would need to be rebuilt from scratch. Now I would elaborate on the methods of backing up the Blog first and then the database with the most commonly used tools.

Backing up your WordPress Blog: There are three ways to backup your blog(files).

1. Back Up software provided by your Webhost: Almost all Webhosts provide some software to back up your Blog. You should consult with your respective Webhost and find out what options do you have to back up your Blog. You should also check with them how often do they back up your blog and if they back up just the database or the entire site.
2. Copying your entire blog to your computer using a FTP software: Using a FTP software like FileZilla or CuteFTP you can connect to your server and download the entire site in one of the folders on your computer. If your blog is quite large with lot of images and other graphics you can use a Zip software to Zip it and save space, which will let you have multiple back ups without wasting space. A comprehensive guide by WordPress.org about FTP clients and how they work is given here.
3. Synchronizing your Blog with the backup of your computer: There are certain softwares that can automatically sync your Blog contents and the changes that you make on your blog,with the files that you have previously backed up on your computer. Its a a automated process and saves time. Once you get a hang of it, backing the Blog will become quite easy. SyncBackSE and WinSCP are two products that allow you to sync your blog. You can download them and get more information about them by clicking on the names.

Backing up your WordPress Database: There are three ways to back up your WordPress Blog Database.

1. Using a web-based MySQL database Administrative tool: Almost all webhosts provide a utility like phpMyAdmin which is a program to perform administrative operations on your database.Its graphical user interface makes it more intuitive to use. An excellent guide to backup the database using phpMAdmin can be found here. Another excellent guide can be found here. Please bookmark these links for future as backing up of the database is of prime importance. However phpMyAdmin can’t handle large databases. For large databases straight MySQL code would help. Instructions can be found here.
2. Using the WordPress database backup Plugins: There are quite a few plugins that would help us backup our WordPress database. The ones I have used or currently using and recommend are, WordPress Database Backup. Another effective plugin for database backup is BackUp WordPress, its in beta phase but it works quite fine.
3. Using an Online Blog Backup Service: This is also a good option. You can use this as a back up of the back up. One of the great features of a Online Blog back up service is that once you set it up, its completely automated and each post is backed up after its published. The one week of data that I had not manually backed up was recovered from one such service. I would recommend you register for one as well. The one I use is Blog Back Up Online. Limitations are 50 Mb space and its in Beta stage. It supports all major blogging platforms.

After backing up your blog, in case something goes wrong and you need to restore the back up, and excellent guide to restore your database can be found here.

I hope you find the above information useful and make the best use of it. I would ask you to backup your blog every week at the least. I would be more than happy to answer and assist you with any stage of backing up your blog as I have gone through the entire process, using all the above methods to get the peace of mind that my blog is perfectly safe.

If you like this post then please consider subscribing to my Full RSS feed. Join the Discussions about Blogging and Social Networking in the Forum.Thanks for visiting!