Backup Your Blog Regularly

Creating backups of your blog is like drinking water. You know you should do it at regular intervals, but often times other activities get in the middle and you just forget about it.

The possible consequences of not backing up your blog, however, are much more serious than missing the middle-morning water glass. Should your server crash for some reason, or your websibe get hacked, you will lose valuable data.

Personally, I try to backup all my websites weekly (but I am lazy, so if you have time you can even do it daily!). Below you will find a quick checklist for backing up your blog.

Use an FTP client to download all the site files (the Wordpress folder)
Log into phpMyAdmin and select your Wordpress database
Click on “Export” and make sure that all the Wordpress tables are there
On the “Structure” section tick “Add Drop Tables,” “Add AUTO_INCREMENT,” and “Enclose table and field names with backquotes”
On the “Data” section leave all the boxes unticked
Tick “Save as file” and download the database (you can use compression if your database is big)

If you don’t have access to phpMyAdmin, you can use the Wordpress Database Backup plugin.

Daniel Scocco on July 13, 2007 Subscribe to our RSS Feed

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53 Responses to “Backup Your Blog Regularly”

dEEPAK on July 13th, 2007 7:24 am

yup.. even I backup my blog weekly.. I use the method described by you i.e via http://FTP..
Actually I’ve set a reminder on my cell phone to backup my blog
Daniel on July 13th, 2007 7:26 am

dEEPAK, notice that saving the site files alone will not backup your database. I think you know that though.
Jeremy Steele on July 13th, 2007 7:29 am

On top of backing up your whole blog at least once a week, I’d also recommend backing up just your database data at least every two days. It really comes in handy if you get in a copyright dispute with someone.

Plus think about it, if you server gets hacked and you only back up the database once a week, you may have to roll back an entire week. That can be really painful by itself, but imagine if one of those lost posts got Dugg.
Daniel on July 13th, 2007 7:36 am

Jeremy, yeah I should probably backup the database every couple of days or so. I am trying to setup an automatic backup for DBT, will keep you guys updated.
dEEPAK on July 13th, 2007 7:40 am

yup Daniel.. I backup my database too..
And Jeremy has a good point here about database backup every 2 days..
Stephen on July 13th, 2007 7:45 am

I think the best guideline wouldn’t be to back up ever week, but every few posts. The point, after all, is not to lose important data. Comments are nice and all, but it’s the posts you really don’t want to lose. I say back up after posting anything that took you more than a few hours to produce, be that a single evergreen post or several smaller ones.

It’s also worth noting that, should you suffer a mishap and lose a post or two that you don’t have backed up, you can often go into Google’s cache of your blog and recover it there.
Jeremy Steele on July 13th, 2007 7:47 am

“you can often go into Google’s cache of your blog and recover it there.”

Very good point, hopefully the Google Bot visits often.
Patrick Altoft on July 13th, 2007 7:47 am

I run a script every 24 hours to back up the whole database and send it by email to my gmail account, the link to the script is here (its free):
http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/blo.....r-website/
Bushido on July 13th, 2007 7:48 am

Doesn’t Wordpress have an option in the wp-admin menu that allows you to export all your posts to an XML file? You can the import that file from the same wp-admin menu and get all your posts back if you should lose them. I’m not really sure, though if it does the same to your comments as well.
Daniel on July 13th, 2007 8:03 am

Bushido, I think you would be safer making a backup of the whole database. Apart from posts, it will also carry the comments and other tables required for plugins.

Patrick, good one, exactly what I was looking for!
OneYearGoal.com on July 13th, 2007 8:11 am

Thanks for the tip.
I recently installed a plugin that pretty much wiped out my hosting account. I wish I’d followed your advice then.

One Man. One Year. $100,000 online. How’s he doing it?
http://www.oneyeargoal.com
Genesis on July 13th, 2007 8:45 am

I learned this one the hard way when I lost one of my blogs by accident and my last backup was 3 weeks earlier! Luckily my host did have backups for the week before, so I managed to save most of the information (the rest I got off my feed reader which has my blogs on it). But now I do twice weekly backups!
SteveL on July 13th, 2007 10:12 am

What do you think about backing up your database and home folder from your Internet host?

I use Blue Host, and their control panel makes both a snap.
Daniel on July 13th, 2007 12:13 pm

SteveL, I never used that feature, but I guess it should work as well.
Dana on July 13th, 2007 1:03 pm

I use the WordPress Database Backup plugin to automatically back up daily. The zipped database file is emailed to my gmail account, in case my computer crashes.

I back up my site files via FTP once a week by using the same backup program that I use to back up my computer. All those files are saved on an external hard drive.

I like automation, no need to use the brain to remember
P.C. on July 13th, 2007 2:43 pm

Great tips. Just don’t forget to backup all your computer files too, especially if that’s where you’re storing your blog backups!
Daniel on July 13th, 2007 3:13 pm

P.C., good point :).
Jeremy Steele on July 13th, 2007 4:54 pm

SteveL - That is what i do for my sites. works like a charm
SteveL on July 13th, 2007 6:27 pm

Jeremy, it’s my preferred backup. I can watch it download, and store it on my own drive.

Blue Host makes it a breeze via the Control Panel to upload either the whole directory or just the database.
GoddessCarlie on July 13th, 2007 11:47 pm

I use the plugin to automatically backup my stuff every day.
Michiel on July 14th, 2007 2:19 pm

Still don’t know how to do this.
I’m not familiar with all the expressions, you see.
Daniel on July 15th, 2007 1:50 am

Michiel, send me an email and I will try to help you out over IM.
Mike Panic on July 16th, 2007 5:18 am

Last week my web host went down for about 4 hours. Fearing the worst, I panicked because I had not made a backup in a long time. After it came back up, it was the first thing I did w/ the WP backup plugin.

The one thing this article didn’t cover was - what to do with the backup. My day job is in IT, backing up several places is key. Keep a local copy on your computer and another on an external hard drive if you have one.

What I’ve been doing is sending the backup copy of my site(s) to my Gmail account using the Gmail Space add-on for Firefox. Once in Gmail I use a filter to put it into a “website backups” archived area. If my server goes down and my home computer dies, I still have a copy of the website floating out there in the land of Google.
William Profet from OneJobTwoSalaries.com on July 17th, 2007 7:26 am

The backup is one of the most important and the most postponed activity!

Make it a ritual and do it frequently!

Regards,
William
Mike on August 6th, 2007 4:26 pm

I just wrote this handy little script that you may find useful…

http://blog.mlynn.org/gbackup/gbackup.php
Yong Hwee on September 16th, 2007 5:29 am

I’ve just started a new blog and this will come in handy in future. Thanks!
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Jonas on February 25th, 2008 11:26 pm

Hi, there is a new blog backup service at http://blogbackupr.com
Mieke Janssens on March 12th, 2008 8:47 pm

Hi

Thanks for the great tips

I’ve been looking for an easy way to back up my websites (including my blogs). Unfortunately if you have several sites on different servers, manually downloading all files takes up a lot of bandwith.
My ISP only allows me to up- and download 10GB every month - when I backup all my sites once, I use half of that. And backing up only once a month is not such a good idea, since I’m pretty active :o)

I was wondering if anybody knows any solutions that won’t require a full download every time again - so I can save my bandwidth to build my ebiz?

Greetz!
Mieke
Sondan on April 18th, 2008 5:32 pm

How do I backup my Wordpress Hosted (Wordpress.com) blog database please? I recently had to restore about a dozen posts on my blog from the Google Cache and the Technorati Cache since WP couldn’t/wouldn’t get to my request to restore in entirety.

I would love to have my own backup so that I don’t have to depend on anyone but myself to restore.

Thanks in advance
Ngarag on May 17th, 2008 3:16 pm

Great and interesting tip. This is a very helpful resource to all bloggers like me who don’t want to lose their blogs.
Blog Backup Addict on May 17th, 2008 11:04 pm

This post (and its comments) supports the theory that most bloggers don’t backup their blogs. I cannot stress enough how this is important.

Fellow bloggers heed the call. Back up your blogs now and regularly from now on.
FT Lauderdale Real Estate on June 25th, 2008 3:55 pm

ohh, i havent backed up in a while, thanks for the reminder

Backup Your Blog Regularly

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