| 14 November |
Backing up WordPress Automatically |
On November 11th McColo was turned off for hosting many spam, child porn, and malware sites (article at WashingtonPost.com). But although heavily infused with kiddie porn, malware, and spambot networks, ther were more than a few legitimate sites hosted there too. And now they’re scrambling to rebuild their blogs, sites, and all their content somewhere else. The discouraging thing is thinking about how many sites use WordPress and all of the legitimate ones now trying to rebuild didn’t have good backup. So they’re in tough times right now.
But you can automate backup to internet for your WordPress sites by taking action now. We prototyped, tested, and then put together a way that anyone with a WordPress site can use to automatically backup.
Automated WordPress Backup to Internet
A. First off, choose the email address you want to use to receive the initial backups. As long as it’s one that downloads to your local system (no web email for this, use Outlook, SeaMonkey, Evolution, you get the idea) you don’t want to use a email address hosted with your domain as that could also fail with the rest of your site.
B. You can do this by setting up a CRON job manually, or you can download a couple handy plugins (WP-DB-Backup and WP-Cron) to do the job for you. Activate both plugins in your WordPress plugin management page after you’ve downloaded, upzipped, and uploaded them to your site. A whole bunch of different plugins are included with WP-Cron. Just activate the ones called WP-Cron and WP-DB-Backup.
C. Now, with the plugins activated, click the “Manage” tab in WordPress. You’ll see a menu item called “Backup”. This is the desired one. There are various settings for doing a manual backup. Skip that and go to the section titled “Scheduled Backup” (at the bottom). If you don’t see it, you don’t have WP-Cron enabled, so make sure it is. In the settings for this section, set the schedule to “Daily” (or whatever timeframe is appropriate for your site). Enter the email address you selected where it says “Email backup to:”. Lastly, you have the option to include nonstandard QWordPress SQL tables. We think bakcing them all up is the safe way to do it. By default, the plugin will backup all native WP tables. After selecting any other tables, click Submit.
D. Now, the FailSafe part. Grab yourself a copy of OPENRSM CloudBackup. It’s reliable, secure, and most flexible backup to internet product we’ve tried. Setting it up is dead simple for Windows, MAC, and Linux systems. Just make sure to select the options for backing up your email folders (different on Windows, MAC, and Linux but it’s obvious and easy). Click “Daily” to set the schedule.
E. There you go, that’s it! Your WordPress SQL backups should be emailed to you and they’ll be using the backup to internet features of CloudBackup to make sure you don’t lose your site. Check the backup and see it churn out the backup. You can now quit worrying and let the plugins, your email account, and CloudBackup do all the work. Just make sure to delete older backups from your email occasionally and your work is done.
And if your server should crash? You’ve now enabled fast and easy recovery and your not having to sweat it out like those caught off guard when their host goes down.
