Don’t Be Foolish, Backup Wordpress Regularly and Before You Upgrade!

written by Anthony Dinh

May 5, 2008 · Posted Under blogging | wordpress ·

As a followup to my Wordpress 2.5.1 Released post, I just wanted to stress the importance of performing regularly scheduled backups of both your Wordpress installation files, as well as your MySQL database since it contains every post, link, comment, plugin and css modification you’ve ever made. For you new bloggers out there who are just joining the blogging community and even some of you seasoned bloggers, regularly backing up your files is a good habit to get into. For the rest of you, if you’ve already implemented a solution to cover your butt in the event of a natural disaster or file corruption, give yourselves a pat on the back! Taking the few minutes required to perform a backup now will save you a lot of headaches in the future when a major catastrophe strikes, and trust me, you’ll surely be glad that you did it.

How often should I backup?
This is totally up to you, but minimally, I would suggest at least once a week. Some things to consider are how often do you blog, how much information would you lose if something were to go wrong, how much of a setback would it be if you were to lose the data, and how would you feel about the loss of the posts that you worked so hard write?

How many backup instances should I keep?
Typically, I think most authors retain 1 instance and overwrite it with each successive instance in the interest of saving space and time on managing multiple copies. What if the backup gets corrupted or is lost, you might ask? I would recommend keeping a copy in at least 2 different locations that are geographically remote from each other using any one of the following formats (flash drive, CD, hard drive, remote ftp/host server, etc.). It wouldn’t do you any good to have a copy at home and one a couple miles down the road at work in the event of a major flood like we had with Hurricane Katrina would it?

How do I address large databases?
If the database is large, you can try compressing it using any of the various file compression tools such as Winzip for Windows based systems, or you can just tarball or gzip it on *nix platforms. Also, if you are running any anti-spam or statistical plugins that are constantly logging large amounts of data, you can opt to exclude these tables from your backup since they are not too important to keep.

How do I automate backups?
There are several methods available to automate backups via cron or scheduling, but regardless of whichever method you choose, I would highly recommend running backups manually once in awhile so that you can verify nothing has “broken” and that your backups continue to run properly.

1. Backing up your Wordpress installation files
Below are the files that should be backed up

• Wordpress Core Installation
• Wordpress Plugins
• Wordpress Themes
• Image Files
• Javascript, PHP, CSS and other scripts

Most hosts backup their servers regularly, but you still run the risk of losing some data if their latest copy is older than what you’d like, not to mention the downtime you would incur while waiting for them to restore your site, so it’s best to put control in your own hands rather than rely on sombody else. You can either use WinSCP or 2Bright Spark’s Synchback to keep a mirror of your site on a remote server or local machine, or you can use FTP or *nix shell scripts to copy the files to a folder on your local machine.

2. Backing up your MySQL database
phpMyAdmin is the database management system of choice used by most website hosts, so I will explain how to backup your database using this method.

• Click on Databases in the control panel

• You may see several available databases, select the one that you created during the Wordpress install

• Only default tables will be listed, you may have other tables if you’re running any statistical plugins or anti-spam software, select only the ones containing your Wordpress data and hit Export