Backing Up Your Site
Day 36 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide
If you started your website a couple of weeks ago, by now you probably have a fair amount of content going. That content has value, and you have to be careful to protect it. I have had sites crash before and hosts who lost all my data. Luckily that occurred before I hosted a blog, and I had a static copy on my personal computer. Those websites had an inherent backup, but your blog does not. So you need to be extra careful with it.
Wordpress Plugin
The first line of defense that you should use for backups is, of course, a wordpress plugin. Wordpress Database Backup is a great automated tool for backing up your site. Set it up to automatically e-mail you your backups every day or every week, I don’t recommend less frequently, and you are well on your way to being secure. But don’t e-mail your backup to your website email. I.e. Backup@SavvyAffiliate.com would be bad for me. If your site crashes your email might too. Use a third party, like Yahoo, which now has unlimited storage.
Subscribe to Your Own Page
Need more protection? Subscribe to your own feed in Google Reader or bloglines. If you ever lose a recent post, you can just look it up there and resurrect it.
This is a good idea in any even, as it is always good to check what your readers are actually seeing
Download locally
As a tertiary backup, take the time to download a local copy to your machine every now and then. It may seem like overkill, but taking the time to make several different backups of your site, and storing them in separate places, is a good investment of time. There is nothing like losing months or years or work to make you kick yourself for not taking a more proactive role in protecting your data.
on June 28th, 2007 at 6:39 am
Download a copy to your machine? How does one do that? Are you talking about the xml file?
on June 28th, 2007 at 10:44 pm
With the Wordpress plugin mention above it is a one click option right off of the WP-admin area of your blog.
If you are using a different blogging service then I am less familar, but you still should be able to log onto your hosting company and download your mySQL database to your machine.
Now actually restoring your website from the backup will be more difficult. But I figure I’ll google that if this blog ever crashes
on October 31st, 2007 at 11:29 am
i recent had to reinstall wordpress, lost everything. No im safe from that thanks again