3 Plugins To Help Back Up Your WordPress Blog
If you have ever lost your blog, and didn’t have a backup, you know how gut-wrenching it can be. I have had it happen to a couple of blogs through my time online. I guess third time is the charm, and I now always install a plugin to backup the database each week and email me the backup file. While researching this post, I found a couple other plugins besides the one I use that actually look even better.
First, the plugin I use is WP-DBManager. This plugin not only backups the database and emails you a copy while archive a copy on the server, it also has some other utilities to work with the MySQL tables without poking around in PHPMyAdmin. I have been using it for a couple years now, and have had to restore a blog once using the backup. While it was only needed once in two years, that restore saved hundreds of posts that would have probably been lost otherwise. Granted, i may have been able to save the blog with a server backup, but that is even more labor intensive to restore. If you are shared hosting, there is also a very good chance they wouldn’t actually have a restorable backup for you. Don’t ask me how I know that…
The next plugin I found that I like is Snapshot Backup, which not only backups the database, but the WordPress installation files as well, and then uploads it to a remote server. I think this is a great added functionality, especially if you are uploading a lot of media into your WordPress installation as well. There was only one person reporting that it worked with WordPress 3.1, so it may be something to try out for yourself.
The last plugin take it a little further. wp Time Machine backs up both the files and database and then you have a choice of either using Amazon S3, Dropbox, or a remote FTP host to store your files. This is an even better solution, but there have been some conflicting reports on WordPress 3.1. I will probably be testing this one next week, and I’ll let you know how it goes. Storing the backups in the cloud intrigues me, however realize even cloud backups can have problems, so I suggest backing up to a CD or DVD weekly or monthly.
Kevin Davis
Kevin Davis is a technical founder of Social Traffic Lab, a training website for entrepreneurs and small business owners focused on providing training for leveraging social media while growing your business. You can connect with Kevin on Google+
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