Importance of Making a Backup of Your WordPress Blog

For those of you that have a business based on the web, mainly in regards to running WordPress based sites it's extremely important to have a good backup process in place. So for those of you that do not have a regular backup regime
I invite you to read this post to find out how easy it is to make a backup of a WordPress blog.

Not only will having a backup make restoring the site much earlier, but it will give you peace of mind knowing that if something should ever go wrong with the site, whether it's a server failure, a malware attack, a quirky plug-in that takes the site offline, or if you just changing hosting companies, that you will not lose all the work you have put into it.

I learned my lesson years ago when I first started using WordPress. I had a site hosted by a 'cheap' hosting company that offered umlimited bandwidth and disk space. At the time it was a great deal until the company shut off their servers and went out of business. So really two lessons were learned with this:
1) only choose reliable hosting companies and
2) make a backup daily of your site.

Before WordPress I created sites in HTML and PHP. Backing up these files were pretty straightforward, just burn them to a CD or copy over to an exte
al hard drive. But now having to deal with databases and other server resources it's not that simple, but yet it is simple if you have the right tools and knowledge.
Cpanel Backupr
If you are on a web host that offers CPanel, there is an option that you can choose which will let you backup your home directory, your MySQL databases and all your email settings. Choose this option if you plan on switching web hosts or just let the new host switch everything over for you.

WordPress Backupr
For backing up WordPress Databases I like to use a plug-in called WP-DB-Backup which you can set on a schedule to have an automatic backup sent to you daily via email or stored on the server (which defeats the purpose of a backup). This is the easiest method because if you ever need to restore the backup this plug-in can accommodate with the import database feature, which will auto restore all your posts, settings, etc... Also make sure that you have an extra copy of your theme files stored remotely too. So if you do have to restore of move to another host all you need to do is upload your theme directory to get the same look and feel back from your original.

Backup Maintinancer
After you have all of the necessary files backed up it’s important to keep a good record of what files they are and where they are located. Just getting into a habit of making a backup will make this process much easier. Simply choose a storage location on your hard drive, it could be an extra partition, a hidden directory that only you know about, or you could just use an USB stick that has enough storage capacity to hold all of your files. After you determine your backup location, just remember to override the files daily or weekly, whichever works best for your needs. This way should you ever need to access these files you know exactly where to do to get them for a restore.
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Hopefully this will put in the right frame of mind to make a backup of your work in the case something should ever go wrong.