Backing up your Wordpress installation.
I’ve found that many bloggers with Wordpress installations seem to overlook the simple task of backing up their data. Rather, they put their blogging fate into the hands of their trustworthy web-hosting provider. Not that I don’t trust my provider, but I like to sleep knowing full well that my data is resting in a few safe places – rather than putting my eggs all in one basket. So you can either learn the hard way like here, here, and here, or you can follow the simple backup recipe below.
Backing up your Wordpress blog calls for the installation of two very simple Wordpress plugins, WP-DB Backup and WP-Cron, and a dummy Gmail account. After going through the painstaking task of downloading, installing, and configuring each plugin on my hosting provider, I come to find out that other users have reportedthat these plugins have stopped working for Wordpress 2.0.4, the exact version I have installed on my hosting provider. After searching around a bit (how did people live without Googs?), I found this blog posting that outlined the exact versions of the plugins you’ll need to get backups working with Wordpress 2.0.4. In any case, I’ll walk you through the procedure I followed to get my Wordpress installation backed up.
The setup
If you’ve somehow managed to SSH/telnet into your hosting account, you can issue the wget command to retrieve the two Wordpress plugins. I highly suggest creating a temp directory, then cd’ing into the directory to execute these commands.
wget URL/TO/LATEST/WP-DB-BACKUP.zip wget URL/TO/LATEST/WP-CRON.zip
Note: I didn’t include the URL’s since they are likely to change depending on when this post is read.
The install
After downloading these two files, you’ll need to move them into your Wordpress plugins directory using the following command:
mv *.zip WP_INSTALL_DIRECTORY/wp-content/plugins
Cd into the directory and extract the two zip files using the following commands:
unzip LATEST_WP-CRON.zip unzip LATEST_WP-DB-BACKUP.zip
Once these files are unzipped, click here to find the files you need to overwrite. This can be done by cutting and pasting the file contents from the blog over to the same files on your hosted account. You can even delete the files on your hosted site and create a new file with the contents from the aforementioned blog.
You pick your poison.
Once installed, login to your Wordpress admin site and find the Plugins link atop the administration panel. You’ll have to ‘activate‘ your plugins via the administration panel. Once you’ve activated both WP-Cron and WP-DB Backup, click on the Manage link atop the administration panel. In the sub panel, you’ll find a new link that reads ‘Backup’.
The config
I highly, highly recommend that before setting up your backup to execute nightly, immediately test to see if you can backup your current Wordpress installation. This can be done by selecting the ‘Email backup to:’ option (fill in an email address) and pressing the Backup button. Once you know that the backups are working (check your email address)… fill in the Scheduled backup section by selecting Daily and filling in an email address. Make sure to add any extra tables (if there are any) that you would like to backup.
You’re probably wondering what the Gmail account was for. Since Google mail offers a sweet 2 GBs of free storage, create an appropriately named dummy Gmail account such as ‘my-blog-backup@gmail.com’ and send all your backups to this address. Periodically, download the backups to your home machine by accessing Gmail via POP, but also leave a few backups sitting in the actual account. If you ever approach the 2 GB storage limit, log into your account via the web and delete the extraneous backups.
Voila! Blog on!
Now bloggers can rest assured that Googs, your hosting provider, and your local machine will have a copy of your current blog.
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