There’s No Excuse for No WordPress Backup

There's No Excuse for No WordPress Backup

If you're self-hosted and run a WordPress blog, there's absolutely no excuse for not having a current backup of your WordPress database.

WordPress Database Backup, now at version 2.1.2, is currently being maintained and is kept up-to-date by Austin Matzko at Il Filosofo. I recommend this plugin for creating your primary backup daily. You can have it emailed to you instead of saving it on the server.

A second backup option is Lester "GaMerZ" Chan's WP-DBManager. The latest version (2.11) incorporates everything the other one has in it and much more. Due to shared hosting, some people (like me) have problems with certain functions that are used. It's a simple matter to change the word 'passthru' to 'exec' in those places, if that's the only problem you have. These are the files I had to change:

database backup.php - line 53
database-manage.php - line 53
dbmanager.php - line 78

Other than that, everything else worked like a charm. I have both plugins sending me backups by email daily, which I discard once they become more than a week old, but I use the scheduled maintenance functions of the latter.

So you see, with two automatic backup options (the only two that I know of), there really is no excuse not to have a backup.

Update:

Hari reminded me that some hosts offer automated backups on their servers as well.

Matthew reminded me about his post on using cPanel (if your host uses it) to back up the entire website, not just the database.

June 6th, 2007 By RT Cunningham | Categories: WordPress | Tags: backups, plugins |

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hari on June 6th, 2007 at 7:37 pm (Reply)

My server does automatic regular backups of the whole MySQL database, so I have to do nothing extra.

Also a better backup solution is to download the XML Export file of wordpress, which is more convenient.

RT Cunningham on June 6th, 2007 at 7:43 pm (Reply)

Mine does too, but it's worthless if their server goes down for the count. I actually have three backups going at all times. One backup on the server, one that comes to me via email and the third stays at my gmail account.
2. hari on June 6th, 2007 at 7:56 pm (Reply)
  
  In my case, since my friend is hosting the blog, he would always have access to the server, so I worry less than I used to earlier.
  
  You're right. Offline backups are the best thing. The only thing is, I don't want to do them regularly for bandwidth reasons.

Matthew Jabs on June 6th, 2007 at 9:15 pm (Reply)

For the best automated option available for backing up your site, to a remote location, see this post on eJabs.

This not only backs up your WP databases, and not only all your WP files, but also backs up your entire home directory (which contains your entire website) and it will even send it to a remote FTP location.

Flawless my friends…flawless…

Thanks Vanessa.

RT Cunningham on June 6th, 2007 at 9:21 pm (Reply)

I didn't think about that. And stop calling me Vanessa!
2. Matthew Jabs on June 6th, 2007 at 9:32 pm (Reply)
  
  lol…
  
  Sorry, you just look like a Vanessa!

Gabriel on June 7th, 2007 at 7:37 am (Reply)

Thanks for the info. This will be a handy plug-in that I'll be adding to my current set.

Matthew Jabs on June 8th, 2007 at 2:13 am (Reply)

RT…you're not using the auto backup script from my post?

To me it's by far the easiest way to back up your whole website (especially if you have several domains on it like I do…www.mattjabs.com)

RT Cunningham on June 8th, 2007 at 2:18 am (Reply)

I already have a complete backup of everything else (it's how I do my tweaking and stuff). I only need the database backed up regularly. I've only had one time where I needed to restore and I ended up using the cached feed from Google Reader because it was faster.

40 Gigs of my drive is dedicated to backups, plugin zips, etc. Too many backups and I'll have no space left.
2. Matthew Jabs on June 8th, 2007 at 3:09 am (Reply)
  
  Funny you mention that. How big is your HDD?
  
  Just a few days ago I bought & installed a 320GB SATA drive. Previously, for the last 6 years I was using a 20GB IDE HDD…lol, funny but true.
  2. RT Cunningham on June 8th, 2007 at 3:15 am (Reply)
    
    It's 80 GB. 40 of it is taken up by XP and all the applications I use. I have all kinds of stuff on here, but the thing runs flawlessly, even in this high humidity (which is NOT recommended).
    
    The only thing I did when I bought my laptop was to beef up the RAM to a gig. I'm sure it will eventually die, like all PCs, but it's still going strong after a year and a half. Of course, I keep the cruft from building up with a custom script that cleans up everything that Windows leaves behind. I run it once a week and it takes about three minutes.
    2. Matthew Jabs on June 8th, 2007 at 3:32 am (Reply)
      
      Okay…I give up…what's the script?
      
      Did you write it?
      2. RT Cunningham on June 8th, 2007 at 3:38 am (Reply)
        
        I didn't write it, but I altered it so much that no one else can use it or I'd share it with the world.

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There's No Excuse for No WordPress Backup