WordPress Backups–How to Avoid Losing Your Blog
06. Sep, 2011 
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You spend countless hours on your WordPress blog choosing the perfect theme and customizing it for your needs, creating lots of content for it and driving traffic. What if one day your blog just disappeared?
Yes, your blog can just disappear because it happened to me once because of a hacker and another time because I had updated a plugin that was incompatible with the current version of WordPress that I was running. I got an inbox message on Facebook from a client telling me that my blog was down. I quickly typed in the URL and sure enough what appeared was a long, elaborate error message where my blog should have appeared. Because I have my blog set to automatically backup, it took just a minute or two to restore it, but if I had not been backing it up this could have been a catastrophe.
Backing up your WordPress Database Manually
You’ll find click by click instructions for several methods for backing up your database manually using cpanel, PhPMYAdmin, or MySQL on the WordPress Codex page. The only problem with using these methods is that they rely on your remembering to do them on a consistent basis.
codex.wordpress.org/Backing_Up_Your_Database
Backing up your entire blog
The previous recommendations will back up your database meaning that if your blog crashes you can restore the content, but you’ll be left with a basic theme without all of your customizations.
The only real solution to backing up your entire blog is to go with a premium WordPress Backup Plugin. Here are a few that you might look into:
- Automatic WordPress Backup Plugin
- BackupBuddy
- BlogVault
- XCloner
These premium backup solutions backup your entire blog–both the database and the site itself, can be configured to run automatically on a schedule, and they backup your data remotely, so if the server that your site is on goes down, your backups are safe somewhere else.
Take a look at these various solutions and see which ones suite your needs, but then be sure to choose one and set up your backup schedule. This is not an area you should be neglecting because losing your blog is something that you have no control over.
If the unthinkable should happen and your blog crashes, you will only lose any data or changes you’ve made since the last time it was backed up. Your blog will quickly be restored with no worries.
In addition to performing automatic backups on a regular basis, make sure that you have security plugins installed to protect your blog from hackers, you should change your password regularly, use a strong password and a username other than, ‘admin,’ and password protect the ‘WP-Admin’ folder on your server.
The WordPress CMS makes setting up and managing your blog simple and easy, but you’ve got to be sure that you’ve got a reliable and automated way to backup both your database and your blog.
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