Tuesday 20 October 2009

Backing Up That Wordpress Blog

Well I suppose this could be considered the last in an unintended series about backing up and recovering a blog, with a specific focus on Wordpress.

In the first part I covered recovering a deleted blog when no back up existed. While the second part talked specifically about how to get the Google Reader ATOM file converted so it can be imported in to Wordpress.

In this last part I am going to concentrate on backing up your blog, specifically Wordpress because that is what I use.

In the first part one of the recovery methods relied on you having subscribed to your own blogs RSS feed in Google Reader. It also relied on the full post being in the RSS feed and not a summary. So this is our first way of backing up our Wordpress blog. This will also work with any other blogging platforms, so is a nice general tip.

Now Wordpress should adapt the iPhone ad campaign to say “there’s a plugin for that” (thanks Duncan for that quote). Because by installing the WordPress Database Backup plugin you are then able to backup the important Wordpress database tables for your blog. Not only that you can schedule the backup to happen on a regular basis and have the backup emailed to your inbox.

The third and final backup method we will use is to back up all our Wordpress files. To find out how to do that pop on over and read “Automatically Backup Your WordPress Site”. Now this will only work with self hosted Wordpress blogs where you have FTP access to your files. Although this would work with any blog platform where you can get FTP access. So potentially a nice general tip. This will also work if you want to back up a website to.

So there we have it use these three methods and you should be covered if anything goes wrong. Just make sure you keep multiple copies of the back ups and at least one of them offsite (maybe use something like Dropbox, or Live Mesh).

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