Backing up your blog is extremely important and should be done regularly. As the owner of a self-hosted WordPress blog, you are responsible for your own data. If there is a catastrophic failure in your server, or you make a serious mistake, you could lose everything if you don’t keep regular backups. Thankfully, backing up a blog is not very hard, it just takes a few minutes of simple work. Here’s what to do:
To learn about restoring a database backup, see here.
Hosted by Bluehost? Click here for an easier method.
Step 1a: Make a copy of your blog files:
Use an FTP program to navigate to your blog’s installation folder. If your blog is something like “www.mywebsite.com/blog” then that would be a folder called “blog”. If your blog is your whole website, like “www.myphotoblog.com” then your installation folder would be your web root folder, usually called “public_html”, “httpdocs”, or “www”. Look inside possible folders for a group of files, many of which begin with “wp-”. If you can, do a search.
Once you’ve navigated to your blog’s installation folder, download the whole thing — files and folders — to your computer. This will take a long time, maybe an hour or more, so get this started and then go get a cup of coffee from Starbucks or do something else :)
Step 1b: Install Database Backup Plugin
After you’ve got your blog files downloaded, the next step is to backup your blog’s database. The easiest way to get a backup of your database is to use a plugin called “WP Database Backup”.
To install the “WP-DB-Backup” plugin to backup up your database, follow these simple steps:
First, go to “Plugins” => “Add New” in the left sidebar of your main WordPress admin area. Then, in the search bar, type in “WP DB Backup” and click to search. (We’ve recently learned that WordPress is no longer pulling results up for “WP-DB-Backup”, not sure why. Instead, if you search for “WP DB Backup” (without the hyphens) or just “backup”, then it’ll pull it up for you.)
The correct plugin should be right at the top. Click the “install” link on the upper right corner.
Then, click the red “Install Now” button.
Once the plugin is installed, click to activate it.
Step 1c: Backup your Database
Now that you’ve got the database backup plugin installed and activated, to make a backup, go to “Tools” => “Backup” in your WordPress admin area.
and click to exclude spam comments and post revisions (this keeps your backup file size down)
Then, a little further down, choose “download to my computer” and then click “backup now!”.
You will be prompted to download a file with a funny name. Download it and put it in a safe place, hopefully you aren’t going to need it. :) This is your actual backup file. If the backup is complete and you’ve downloaded this file to your computer, then your database is backed up.
To set up an automated, regular, scheduled backup of your blog’s database, just go to the plugin’s admin page (“Tools” => “Backup”) and enter your email address and pick a scheduling interval.
