Don’t be Stupid - backup your Blog
Imagine your worst nightmare, you’ve blogged for a few years, and your hosting company goes out of business, and they haven’t been taking backups. All of that hard work lost – and what for? Just spending a half an hour once a day, backing up your database and files on the server.
If you use Wordpress, then there is a plugin which you can install (I think it comes as default now) and all you do is click on the link on the dashboard, and choose where you want the backup to go, i.e. on to the server, via email or download on to your PC.
This will only backup the database though, and not all of the Wordpress files and folders, i.e. the theme design and plugins. The quickest way of backing up all of the content on your server, is to open up your FTP software, and download all of the files and folders on to your PC.
I’d recommend that you buy an external hard drive, these you can pick up pretty cheaply, i.e. 180GB cost me £85 and you simply plug it in via USB – then download all of the content on to this hard drive every day.
If you don’t have Wordpress then you’ll need to export your .sql file from the database on to your PC, or external hard drive. This file has all of your categories, blog entries, and content – loose this and that is the end of your blog.
Most hosting companies have functionality within the hosting panel, i.e. c panel where you can export the .sql database file quickly and safely, but its’ best to contact your hosting company if you have any problems.
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Filed under: Blog Promotion Tips on September 10th, 2006
Hmm… I should really start backing up my blogs too, even though I only have about 3 posts. :O
thanks for the heads up!
Yes, its best to get in to a routine early stages of you creating your blog though. It’s the last thing I do before I go to bed haha!
Whoa…it takes you a half hour per day to back up your blog.
Very good advice!
I have trillions of blogs
I have SSH access to my sites, so I’ve written a bash script to archive all of my sites. Works very quickly, doing them all in about 30 seconds. Just a single file to download for off-line archiving.
If you’re familiar with unix shells, its a combination of gzip and mysqldump.