Backing up your blog: content backups

If you’re running your blog on a free blog host like WordPress.com or Blogger, chances are you’re not worrying about site backups, because the company is there to take care of regular archives. However, if you’re running your blog on your own hosting account, then you’re not always sure you can get the latest copy of your blog’s database in the even that something screws up.

And trust me, most likely than not, your blog will experience some sort of screw up when least expected. It could be from malicious hackers who can gain access through the database, cross-site scripting or other vulnerabilities, or due to server glitches. Whichever the cause, it’s a good idea to have a regular backup of your blog.

Here we will explore how to make simple backups of a WordPress blog. In backing up your blog, there are two important components: the content and the files.

WordPress stores the content separately from the design and the files. Your blog posts, comments, settings and other information are stored on the MySQL database, and this makes it easy to change design and to move the site to other servers (or domains) without much of a fuss. Backing up your content can either be through database backup or WordPress export.

Backing up database from cPanel

If you have access to your hosting account’s cPanel, you can backup your database through the following steps:

1. Log in to your cPanel account at http://yourdomain.com:2082. Use the account username and password provided by your hosting company.
2. Navigate to Databases, and look for the link to phpMyAdmin.
3. On the left side, select the database that corresponds to your WordPress installation. If you installed using an automated script like Fantastico, it would usually be named XXX_wrdpX (where XXX is your cPanel username). If you did a manual install, you would know how you named your database
4. On the upper navigation links, click Export. You are now ready to download a local copy of your database. Be sure to check the following options: “Add Drop Table” and “save as file.”
5. You can also choose to archive the downloaded file as ZIP, for a quicker download.

Backing up content from WordPress

Backing up your database through WordPress itself is an easier task, but you might not be able to download all options, as this is mostly to save a copy of posts and comments, but not other WordPress settings.

1. Login to WordPress. Depending on the version you are using, the Import/export feature can usually be found either under “Manage” (for pre-2.6 versions) or under “Tools” (2.7 up).
2. Click on the Export link.
3. You can choose to restrict the posts to be exported according to author (useful if you run a mult-user blog). But since we’re backing up our entire blog, leave it as “All authors.”
4. Click the Download Export File button. Your browser will now save an XML file containing posts and comments.

Keep the backup files somewhere safe. It will be a good idea to rename these using descriptive filenames, and with the date of the backup, so you know which is the freshest or newest backup, in case you need to revert to these later on.

In our next post, we shall discuss file backups.