3 Ways to Automatically Backup WordPress Blog (Database + Files)

Three golden rules for all IT administrators are backup – backup and once again backup . It’s a fact , all bad things happen at the same time and usually at the worst timing (Murphy’s law 🙂 ) , so be prepared to handle these situations with the least possible negative effects .  Most of the bloggers spend ton of timing  in creating content for their WordPress websites , but do not think that their WordPress website can go down someday, and they might lose their files . All of their hard work would be gone in a eye-click .

This article will present  3 methods  that let you do scheduled automatic backups of your complete WordPress website. This includes WordPress database, and all the related files, including theme files , plugins, and images . To be honest , these methods will cover 90% of your backup strategies , so you can have peaceful night’s sleep ( alternatively hire an administrator ) .

• Automatic WordPress Backup :  This Plugin is one of the easiest method to completely backup your WordPress website. It will create a zipped backup of your WordPress website, and will upload it to Amazon S3 . This will be a completed automated regular backup without your involvement at all . You can schedule backup as often you desire  . Amazon S3 is pretty cheap nowadays – around $0.1 per GB. This means that if you decide to do a weekly backup of your blog , and the blog is less than 100MB zipped , then you will just spend $0.1 per month for automating backup of your WordPress . For example the blog you are reading now has over 500 articles and the zipped size is under 30MB ( no audio – video’s included ) .
• IDrive  for WordPress : It’s an easy to use backup utility, designed specifically to backup WordPress blog data into your IDrive online backup account . A free life-time registration on IDrive provides you 5G free storage . It provides scheduled as well as immediate backup of WordPress blog data including files and MySQL database dump. Install and activate the IDrive Plug-in for WordPress. Through the Plug-in, create a new IDrive online backup account to start backing up your WordPress data .
• Backup solution on your local computer : Of course you can allays manually make an FTP connection to your website and copy all files .To automatically backup WordPress files on a scheduled basis  :
  
  • first step :  you need to use a FTP client that can automatically connect to your website, and download the files (static files ) . There are many free FTP clients that can do that. My personal favorite is Cobian Backup . In this, you can specify all the folders that you want to backup , frequency of backup , and destination of backups . Cobian Backup will make a zipped backup of your WordPress files as per your scheduled . I have specified my Dropbox folder as my destination folder . This ensures that my backups are actually stored online as well , so I will not lose anything even if my machine crashes .
  • Second step : Usually hosting services provide the ability through an web-application ( PhpMyadmin) to backup your Database-tables ( your actual content)  . There are many plugins available that can backup WordPress database on a regular basis , and can email the backup to you. My favorite one is WP-DB-Backup . Start with installing one of these plugins. You can setup the backup schedule, and provide your email address on which you will receive the backup. Now your WordPress database backup part is complete.

Read also :

• How to Automatically Backup Your WordPress Site to Dropbox