Backup Your Wordpress Databases
Back-ups are a good thing. Nay, a very good thing. Two years ago, I had an external hard drive fail and I lost all my music (including music I made myself), movies and thousands of pictures of my boys. We were able to get many of the images from relatives, Flickr and more, but I learned my lesson the hard way.
These days, I back up to the cloud. I use Mozy Home (now part of EMC) and for $4.95 a month I get unlimited online backups. Now my music, photos, videos, work stuff and more is backed up automatically and I don’t have to worry about it. Mozy has both Windows and Mac clients.
I blogged recently about backing your entire web root up to S3, but maybe you don’t have the access or the knowledge to get that all set up.
If you’re using Wordpress to power your blog, this plugin may be right up your alley. It’s called the Wordpress Database Backup plugin and it pretty much does exactly what the name suggests. It backs up your Wordpress database (which pretty much is the brain of your blog) and allows you to either download it manually to a file or have it emailed to you. The files are compressed so even if you have a great deal of posts, comments and more, the file sizes won’t overwhelm you. The files I get for this blog are about 178k.
What makes the plugin great is the fact you can schedule backups and have them delivered to you via email. You could, conceivably, have the plugin email you a backup every week, and if you’re using the gigs and gigs of storage Gmail gives you, you could just leave the emails and files in Gmail until they’re needed - let Google worry about the storage and bandwidth. The less I have to think about when it comes to blogging, the better, and the plugin makes my life a bit easier.
Even if you don’t set up the cron-type backups, I’d recommend this plugin for the manual backups you can do whenever you want.
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Yup, it’s good stuff! Luckily I haven’t had to actually restore anything yet. Knock on wood that I didn’t just jinx myself.