5 Fantastic Backup Utilities for your WordPress Website
- VaultPress (recommended) – VaultPress provides realtime, continuous backup and synchronization of every post, comment, media file, revision and dashboard setting” – VaultPress
- DropBox for WordPress – “WordPress Backup to Dropbox has been created to give you piece of mind that your blog is backed up on a regular basis.” – DropBox for WordPress
- BackupBuddy – “Backup your entire Single or Multisite WordPress install. Including the widgets, themes and plugins.” – BackupBuddy
- BackWPUp – “Do backups and more for your WordPress Blog.” – BackWPUp
- myRepono – “myRepono is an automated website backup solution.” – MyRepono
Too many businesses learn the painful lesson about backing up their blogs the hard way. They have a major catastrophe and lose months of hard work — because they have no way to restore their sites.
The back-end labor may not be your favorite part of blogging, but it’s a necessary one. Take some time right now to secure your site with a sound, regular backup plan. You’ll be glad you did!
When using WordPress for your website, backing up is a two-step process. We’ll discuss both parts that require your attention and how to back them up effectively.
WordPress Site Files
Your WordPress site files consist of the following:
WordPress Core Installation
WordPress Plugins
WordPress Themes
Images and Files
Javascripts, PHP scripts, and other code files
Additional Files and Static Web Pages
The simplest way to backup these files, is to simply use FTP. Open up your FTP client, navigate on your host server to the folder (directory) that holds your site. Drag and drop it to your desktop. The program will proceed to copy your files to your hard drive, where you can then store them appropriately.
For FTP I use Fetch. It’s a Mac only program that costs $29. My oldest daughter uses CyberDuck. It’s also Mac only and is free. Some popular PC clients are: FileZilla, WinSCP, and SmartFTP.
WordPress Database
Your WordPress database contains your post text, page text, users, and most of the data generated on your site.
In an effort to make the transition to blogging as easy as possible for Win with 1 clients, I have tried to make backup as painless as possible by installing a plugin to easily and clearly automate the database backup process. Unfortunately, I still haven’t found a plugin that I love — and that consistently works as described — but I’m currently using WordPress Database Backup (WP-DB-Backup). While the options don’t always work perfectly, it has never failed to backup.
To use this, just install, activate, and follow the plugin directions.
Backup Both Sides
When spending your time and resources to create a great blog, don’t forget to protect yourself from the inevitable calamities. If you back up both sides of your site — the files and the database — you can restore and be up and running again in no time.
Need help to backup your WordPress website, contact us today.
This information from the lovely Nicole over at Picasso Media Group steps you through the process of manually backing up your wordpress website:
Backing up your website has always been important. The issue of backing up has been brought to the forefront of every small business owner with the hacking attack on Melbourne based hosting company Distribute IT.
The hackers also managed to delete all the backups for Distribute IT meaning that over 4,800 small businesses lost their websites due to the malicious attack on the company. Many of those companies did not have their own backups.
Those lucky enough to keep back ups of their website will be ok, but for those who lost their websites could prove to be a very costly and timely process in getting their websites back online.
Backing Up Your WordPress Website
There are two steps to backing up your site;
1. Copying your wordpress files (this means your theme, uploaded media files and plugins)
2. Backing up your database (which includes all of your page and blog post content)
NOTE: These instructions are only for those who are using cpanel webhosting.
Step One: Backing Up Your WordPress Files
To do this you will need an FTP client (I highly recommend FileZilla which is free to download).
- Open File Zilla and enter in your FTP details (Host, Username and Password) then hit Quick Connect. If you are unsure speak to your website host.
- Underneath you will see two sides of files. The right side are the files that live in your website and on the left are files that are stored on your PC.
- You need to create a backup file on your PC. Right click into the left hand side and click Create Directory. This is where you will copy your files to.
- Now you want to download a copy of your live website files (right hand side) to your PC. Usually the file will be called Public_HTML or httpdocs.
- Select this file so it is highlighted. Right click and select Download.
- The FTP client will then start downloading all your files to your PC.
- Once that is completed you can go onto the next step of Backing up your Database.
Step Two: Backing up you database
For this section login to your website’s cpanel area (usually the same logins as above).
1. Go to the myPHP option
2. Select Database from the main options
3. Then from here you select the database you want to back up. For example “test_wordpress”
4. This will bring up a lot of different files that are in the database.
Click the Export tab, generally the 5th tab across.
5. In the Export box you will need to select all of the files that are to be copied.
(NB: If you have other programs that use the same database please unselect these files). All files to do with wordpress files should be wp_file name.
6. Ensure that SQL is checked!
The SQL section – Tick the following boxes:
- Structure
- ‘Add DROP TABLE / VIEW / PROCEDURE / FUNCTION’
- ‘Add IF NOT EXISTS”Add AUTO_INCREMENT’ and
- ‘Enclose table and field names with backquotes’
7. The DATA section
Leave the boxes inside this section unticked, but make sure to keep the checkbox next to the “DATA” heading checked.
8. Tick the ‘Save as file’ option, and leave the template name as is.
9. Now click ‘Go’ and you should be prompted for a file to download. Save the file to your computer. Depending on the database size, this may take a few moments.
If you don’t want to risk doing this yourself ask Picasso Media Group how we can help you. We can back up and store a copy of your website in case of emergency.