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Automatically Backing up WordPress
By Tech Boy | December 2, 2008
On November 11th McColo was turned off for hosting many spam, child porn, and malware sites (article at WashingtonPost.com). Although a small percentage, there were legitimates sites hosted there. And now they’re scrambling to rebuild their blogs, sites, and all their content somewhere else. The depressing thing is thinking about how much work the legitimate (and now down) sites are going thru without a good backup to recover with. So they’re having it rough right now.
But by taking action now and ensuring you have automated backup to internet for your WordPress sites you are protecting yourself. We looked around and put together five simple steps that anyone with a WordPress site can use to ensure a frequent, secure, and safe backup.
Automated WordPress Backup to Internet
A. First off, choose the email address you want to use to receive the initial backups. As long as it’s one that downloads to your local system (no web email for this, use Outlook, SeaMonkey, Evolution, you get the idea) you don’t want to use a email address hosted with your domain as that could also fail with the rest of your site.
B. Now, there’s two ways to do this, manually setting up a CRON job, which is more trouble than a lot of people want to deal with, or you can download these handy WordPress plugins, WP-DB-Backup and WP-Cron (google it). Download both of the plugins, unzip, upload to your WordPress plugins folder and in your WordPress plugin management page activate them. A variety of plugins are included with WP-Cron. Just activate the ones called WP-Cron and WP-DB-Backup.
C. Now, with the plugins activated, click the “Manage” tab in WordPress. You’ll see a menu item called “Backup”. You want this one. Manual backups have various settings available. Skip that and go to the section titled “Scheduled Backup” (at the bottom). You need to make sure to enable WP-Cron (if it’s visible, it’s enabled). In the settings for this section, set the schedule to “Daily” (or whatever timeframe is appropriate for your site). Where it says “Email Backup To:” put in your email address (Step A). The option to include noncore WordPress tables is the final step. We think the safe choice is to back them all up. Backing up all native WordPress tables is the default. After you’ve decided about the tables, if you have any others, hit “Submit”.
D. Now the “Iron Clad” part. Grab yourself a copy of OPENRSM CloudBackup. It’s a backup to internet service that’s reliable and easy. Setup for Windows, MAC, and Linux are all equally dead simple. Make sure to select the options for backing up your email folders (and anything else you need to backup). Set the schedule by selecting “Daily”.
E. There you go, that’s it! Your WordPress SQL backups should be emailed to you and they’ll be using the backup to internet features of CloudBackup to make sure you don’t lose your site. Check the account and see the backups roll. You can now quit worrying and let the plugins, your email account, and CloudBackup do all the work. Just make sure to delete older backups from your email occasionally and your work is done.
And if your host goes down? Fast and easy recovery is now enabled and your not worrying what will happen to you if your host goes away.
Topics: Internet |
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