Are you backing up your blog?

Posted on October 22nd, 2007 by Richard Catto 1,615 views

Do you have a popular blog? Do you post at least one new article a day? Do you get a lot of comments?

Is the only copy of all this data residing in one place – in your blog’s database?

If so, then you are very much dependent on your web hoster to be making regular and reliable backups for you, aren’t you? What happens, if for some reason, they decide to terminate your account and refuse to hand over your data?

You’re pretty much up shit creek, aren’t you?

I tell you, it’s too late to start scrambling to solve this problem when your data is no longer accessible to you. It’s GONE! And so has your blog. The blog that you have spent countless hours working on. All gone. Can’t be got back. Gone gone gone. Never to be seen again.

Oh man. This ever happen to you?

On Sunday morning at around 2AM, my server fell over. It crashed. Completely dead. All data on it LOST. Never to be seen again. All gone. My web hoster did have a backup, but backdated to Thursday, October 18. In between Thursday morning and Sunday morning, there were three very full days of blogging done on this site. A very important and controversial issue surrounding muti was addressed and many comments were made.

Now, IF I had NOT had a backup, I would have simply had to accept that all that important discussion was irretrievably LOST.

Fortunately, I did have a backup and I didn’t lose a single article or a single comment. I got lucky. My friend, Candy, who is also hosted on my server, unfortunately did lose some comments (but no articles). The reason is that backups were scheduled to be run only once per day, rather than once per hour, and timing worked against her.

I now have backups running every hour for both myself and Candy.

What we use to do this is incredibly simple. We use the WordPress Database plugin originally written by the legendary Skippy. This ESSENTIAL plugin proved so useful to so many WordPress bloggers that it was integrated into the core of WordPress from version 1.5, only to be controversially removed by Matt Mullenweg in September 2006 when version 2.1 was released.

What makes the backup plugin superior to using the export feature? Two things:

1. It backs up the actual database tables themselves. The export feature does not do that.
2. You schedule them to happen automatically. The export feature has to be done manually – you will neglect it.

So where does the backup get saved to? Well the dumbest thing you could do is to configure the backups to get saved onto your server, because if your server crashes, you are up shit creek again. No, you want to choose the email option. The WP backup plugin will dutifully package up a snapshot of your database tables, both structure and content, into one .sql file, gzip it for you and then email it to you. They land in my gmail every hour now.

One thing you ought to know – there is no restore function on this plugin. To restore your database is simple though. Open phpMyAdmin (which you obviously have installed), click SQL. Copy and paste the contents of the .sql file into the box provided. Hit go. That’s it!

I’m happy. How about you?

Tags: Austin Matzko, Il Filosofo, server crash, Skippy, WordPress Backup plugin
Filed under Backup, WordPress |

One Response to “Are you backing up your blog?”

1. Nick Georgakis Says:
   October 24th, 2007 at 09:00

   Hello Richard,

   Nice seeing that you managed to get your site up and running , without losing data.

   Last month my site was hacked and I would have lost many comments / data if I wasn’t keeping daily backups to a remote FTP server and Gmail , using a custom made Linux shell script.

   Unfortunately I didn’t have the same luck when due to an accident I was forced to be off line for 6 months and was unable to pay for hosting/domain. I was doing backups manually back then , so I lost all comments during that period. (Later on I managed to resurrect most of them via the Internet Archive).

   Keeping a strict backup schedule is very important , even on personal PCs , A few weeks ago my RAID array crashed badly and would have lost all data if I wasn’t keeping daily/weekly/monthly backups on 3 disks.

   I plan to publish the shell script later on this week so you might want to check it out! It requires a more complicated / manual installation but it can keep backups of any SQL database (including WordPress’es DB) to a local folder for customizable number of days , a remote FTP server and to remote/local email/Gmail!

   My Best Greetings from Athens / Greece,

   Nick Georgakis

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.