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Day after day, you work hard on your blog by creating high quality content or by making it more usable and attractive. Owning a blog and producing original content require lots of time and lots of efforts. Of course, you don’t want to loose anything related to your precious work.

Backing up your blog should be a priority among your blog activities. There are plenty of article concerning blog backup, however I think that this topic doesn’t get the attention it really deserve. In fact, you should backup your blog daily or, at least, weekly. Period!

Let’s imagine few seconds that you loose all your articles, all your comments, your customized Wordpress theme, your photos and all your downloadable files. This would be a disaster, isn’t it? How much time would be required to reconstruct a blog like the one you just lost?

Backing up your blog is something simple that doesn’t require so much time. In fact, it really worth the time it takes!

The Basics

When we talk about backing up your blog, this means that you need to backup your blog database which mainly includes your articles and your comments, and your blog platform which include Wordpress itself, your themes, your plugins, your photos and your downloadable files.

Backup your blog = Backup your blog database + Backup your blog platform

Backup Your Blog Database

The simplest way to backup your database is by using a Wordpress plugin. There are several plugins regarding this activity, however I decided to only list 3 of them – which I consider as excellent plugins:

BackUpWordpress.

BackUpWordPress is a Backup & Recovery Suite for your WordPress website. This Plugin allows you to backup database as well as files and comes with a rich set of options.

Homepage: http://wordpress.designpraxis.at/plugins/backupwordpress/

WP-DBManager.

Manages your Wordpress database. Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database.

Homepage: http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming.php

WP-DB-Backup.

WP-DB-Backup allows you easily to backup your core WordPress database tables. You may also backup other tables in the same database.

Homepage: http://www.ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup/

Take a look at them and choose the one that better fill your need.

Backup Your Blog Platform

As you notice in the last section, BackUpWordpress let you backup both your database and your platform. This has the advantage that you may not forget to backup anything if you schedule an automatic backup.

However, if you choose to use WP-DBManager or WP-DB-Backup, you’ll need to do your blog platform backup manually. The simplest way would be to use a FTP client like CuteFTP or to use a specialize software to synchronize your remote files with a local backup.

In Summary

Don’t forget that anything could happen anytime. Of course, the worst case seems to be a server crash. This type of failure is major and may rarely happen, but it could. Moreover, this type of failure often results in corrupted and/or unrecoverable data. However, there are some other situations that may happen more frequently. Let’s think about a simple cut and paste that may erase, by mistake, a bunch of lines on your theme; after you submitted it, it’s too late! You are a human and, by nature, humans are not perfect and do mistakes. However, you have the control to avoid this type of disaster. If you don’t have any backup process yet, invest few minutes right now to get the tools you need. Prevention is the key!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 9:27 am and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.