Beer and Blog

Some people have been asking me about what the group determined at the “Backup your blog” session, so as the ‘ol saying goes, better late than never. I’ll share what we determined below.

First, I pulled together a collection of resources that we referenced during our session, which I’ll post below. Most of the resources are Wordpress oriented, so I’m hoping someone could post helpful links geared at other CMSs, like Expression Engine, Movable Type, etc.

• 8 MySQL Backup Strategies for WordPress Bloggers (And Others) - This was by far the best resource providing eight different options for backing up a blog. It’s weighted toward Wordpress, but many of the options would work for other blog CMSs.
• 4 free tools for fool proof Wordpress backup - This share two ideas not covered in the above article. They’re ok, I’m mostly providing the link for historical reference to the session attendees.
• WP DB Backup - The official Wordpress page for the most popular database backup plugin.
• WP DB Backup - The project page for the most popular Wordpress database backup plugin.
• Wordpress Backups - Official Wordpress instructions for doing a manual backup. Good reference material.
• MySQL DB backup tutorial - A tutorial with screen shots for how to use PHPMyAdmin to backup a MySQL database. Works for an CMS that uses a MySQL database.
• Using a chron to automatically backup your MySQL DB - Explains how to set up a chron to backup files on your server, which include the database and the application files.

For Wordpress, a person needs to be able to back up two things: 1) The “wp-content” folder, which contains your theme, plugins, and any assets you’ve uploaded through Wordpress; and 2) The MySQL database. We found that the easiest solution was to install the WP DB Backup plugin for Wordpress. It took minutes and the plugin simply emails the database to you, which is much safer than storing on the same server you are backing up. The drawback to this approach is that plugin doesn’t backup your “wp-content” folder, which contains your theme, plugins, and uploads. Most people don’t update their theme and plugins much, so you can take care of a backup by simply keeping a local copy of the files you upload. Many people upload files quite frequently (like images for every post), but you can use the same strategy of maintaining a local copy of the uploaded files. No need to download a backup of what you uploaded in the first place, right? I know I never thought about it that way before, so now I just make sure to keep copies of everything I upload on my computer, which includes themes, plugins, and uploads.

Ideally, you would use a chron to automatically backup both the database and the “wp-content” folder. Unfortunately, almost no hosting companies will allow to set up a chron due to security issues. However, if you do own your server, then setting up a chron is the way to go. The MySQL database turns out not to be a very big file, especially if it has been g-zipped. It’s the uploads folder that grows into gigabytes after years of usage. If you were truly ninja, you would only backup the new additions from your last backup to save time and bandwidth, but I can’t help you with that level of optimization.

Finally, Dawn shared that her hosting company, GoDaddy, offered backup as part of the account’s features. If your eyes glazed over during any of this, you may want to look for a hosting company that takes care of the backup process for you.

Seriously, though, whatever you decide will be better than not doing anything. I can’t tell you how much it crushes a person to lose a year or more of work and contributions from readers when it could have been recovered from a backup. If you have any tips you’d like to add here, we would all appreciate it.