Ever since the first computer was powered up, experts have been reminding us to back up our work. The problem is, many of us, myself included, don’t always bother with such inconveniences, until of course we experience some kind of breakdown, or hard drive failure that ends in regretful misery. Along with the traditional backup options that you may have on your computer, there are also valid reasons why you’ll want to create regular back ups of your website properties.
I was recently reminded of the importance of website, or more specifically WordPress backups, when a database for my most active website crashed after I tried to update an old article. I have no idea why or how this happened, and I can say thankfully that in all my years of using WordPress it’s never happened before, but I simply couldn’t get the site reset to it’s normal state. This particular site has almost 100 articles on it, and I can tell you I would have been one sad puppy had this site not been backed up previously.
Another lesson learned from my sordid past is, that if you do add content regularly to your website, you’ll want to back up the site more routinely too. For sites that are just built and generally left alone after an initial period of content production, a single backup is probably just fine, at least for a time. But for a very active and progressive site, you simply don’t want to have to backtrack and load up a number of recent articles, just because your back up is older and outdated a bit. That’s why daily backups are probably best if you can do them.
Also, WordPress is one of those things that get’s updated pretty frequently, and along with core updates, you’ll also see plugin updates come along regularly too. It should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, you should run a back up of your site anytime you’re going to update or upgrade something. Although it’s rare for things to go wrong, the truth is, it can happen where something just misfires during the upgrade and you don’t want to lose your content, site structure, plugins and all that good stuff, if you run into a glitch.
The other thing that can happen, is websites do occasionally get hacked, or for no better word, broken into. Bad people simply want to cause problems. Normally for a WordPress site, they might find a loophole in some plugin that allows them to get into the code or manipulate the code and take the site down. I’m not saying this to scare you, or make you crazy with fear, but you should know that this kind of thing can happen, and the solution is to make some corrections to close any openings, and use a recent back up to get your site up and running as it was before the hack.
My Experience With Back Up Options
I’m a slow learner, I’ll admit that right up front. And I’m also kind of cheap. So historically I had always looked for low or no cost ways of doing WordPress back ups, and with a little bit of searching, it’s not hard to find information on how to do that. There are some free plugins, and features within WP itself that allow you to back up your database, which is where are your articles and content are stored. The other component that requires backing up are the various files that create the look, and functionality of the site.
So if you’re just starting out, or money is kind of tight, or you’re just cheap like me, here are a few options to create a basic backup of your website or blog.
You can always backup your site the old fashioned way. You’ll simply save the raw database file to your hard drive or other storage device, along with the WP files. You’ll need to login to your admin panel, and then find the area listed as phpadmin, in the MySQL database manager. You select the db you want to export and boom, you’re backed up once the files are saved on your computer. Normally these file transfers are done with an ftp program. Filezilla is a free one that’s pretty popular.
You can get detailed instructions on manually backing up WordPress on this page at WordPress.org.
Here’s another, simpler method of backing up the content, author, comments, and other data that make up your site and you can do this within WordPress itself using the Tools>Export feature. Note that you also may want to backup the “files” such as the themes, plugins, etc. but for you database files this simple graphic covers it all.
Want To Make This Back Up Stuff A Bit Easier?
For the techies among us, doing manual backups is really easy no doubt, but as I’ve explained before on this site, I’m not much into any kind of complicated stuff. I’ve tried to back up by blogs before using the manual method and while it worked most of the time, it wasn’t full proof and was always a little bit of a headache. I’m not necessarily afraid of learning certain things, like a bit of coding, or what have you, but anytime I can make a routine process a little simpler, quicker, or automatic, I’ll probably try to do that.
Which leads me into some options that will make backups a bit easier to bear. To do this we’ll use a plugin. If you do a search on WordPress backup plugins you’re sure to find quite a few of them. Historically I didn’t like most of them because they still didn’t simplify things enough or they just didn’t work reliably, but that could have been my fault for all I know. Some of these plugins will allow you to save your site onto your hard drive or disk, while others may send the backup to online storage services such the Cloud or AmazonS3.
Out of the many I’ve looked at or tried to use, here are several that look pretty good.
To be transparent about this, I’ve never used WordPress Duplicator but in reviewing it, it looks easy to work with, and functional. It makes downloading the “package” of database and files straightforward, and deployment of the backup is simple too. Perhaps the best part about Duplicator is it’s free, at least at the time of this writing. It is in beta testing so you may find a few bugs, but it may be worth trying out.
WP Twin is a purchased program that I have used for about a year and in general it’s been a solid system. Really there’s no plugin involved. You upload a single php file to your server, then go to that page in your browser and run a backup. Download the file to save it. If you need to deploy it at some point, you set up a new WP install, and upload a deploying php file to the new set up, along with the backup file, and in a few simple steps you can easily deploy the back up. At the time WP Twin was created, it really provided a nice option for people that didn’t want too many complications. It also allowed the scheduling of backups which was really nice to have. After all one of the challenges of backups in the first place is remembering to do them. But like many things, it’s my opinion that WP Twin has been outpaced by some recent innovations in back up technology.
Backup Creator is my new, favorite back up plugin. It’s installed like a typical plugin and allows for several different ways to backup your entire site and deployment is easy too. There are cases where you may not need to download any large backup files, but instead you can simply transfer them from one WP install to another, so this can save a bit of time (particularly if you’re on a slow connection like I usually am). The built-in backup scheduler is nice too, and this recent improvement is what kind of put it over the top for me. If I were going with a single backup plugin to work with today, hands down it would be Backup Creator at this time. The cost is reasonable with a one-time charge of $47. For what it does, and how it does it…this is a great value!
I think for most people, the options I noted above will be sufficient when you’re just starting out. As I mentioned, a good back up plugin will make things a lot simpler and if you have any content on your site developed at all, or you’re adding content regularly, you’ll find the scheduling feature to be very useful. Without this component, I just never remembered to do backups often enough, and on one occasion I found myself having to reload a bunch of articles that were lost from an active site after a failed upgrade attempt. I was ticked off and angry about the whole thing because it wasted hours of my time, just to get back to square one. Reloading an article or two is no big deal but 20 was a bit much for my taste. So now, I make sure to schedule routine backups with a capable plugin.
What About A Backup Service?
As great as some of the current plugins are, the best way I can describe them is as a self-service option. It’s no big deal to work with the one’s I’ve talked about here, but still, for non-technical people, it’s safe to say that not every backup, or every restore will go just right. They’re not perfect.
So at the beginning of 2012, this got me to thinking that in the case of some of my blogs, and in regards to the value of my time, I might want to do a little research into a type of service that covers site backups, trouble shooting, and restoration, if it becomes necessary. As I mentioned earlier, one of the things that can come up unexpectedly is having your site get hacked. I’ve only had it happen once to an html based site, and never a blog, but it’s always possible. So I wanted to find a service that would provide some kind of monitoring option for the site as well as provide backups automatically.
I’m happy to say I’ve found just what I wanted in the Locker by Code Garage. Their base security package for two WordPress sites costs $10 per month but to me it’s been money well spent. The service provides a 30 day running daily back up of your entire site, as well as security scanning and site uptime monitoring. In other words it will let you know if your site goes down for any reason, which is a good thing.
Now I hadn’t planned on testing this service so soon, but about two weeks after I started with Locker, I tried to do an update on one of my established blogs and had the aforementioned database crash. I attempted to do a self restore (you have access to all your backup files which are stored by Locker) but couldn’t get the site to work. So I contacted support and in less than 24 hours they had the site up and running fine again.
The bottom line is, if your site has value, or is developing a certain degree of value, either monetarily, or to you personally, then this type of service can certainly have it’s place. In a sense it’s like paying to have an IT guy on stand by if you run into problems. I don’t have to think about backing up anything or worrying about if it’s being done. It’s all handled by the service so I can just keep writing and working on the things that matter most to my business. When core updates and plugin updates come along in WP, I’ll generally just take care of them on the spot since I know I have a fresh backup in the can if I need it. So, thus far, I’m really liking Locker.
In the end, it may not matter so much in terms of what you use to backup your WordPress site. The most important thing is that you do it as routinely as you need to, to protect the asset. In addition to this, and this relates to the content portion of your site, I don’t think it’s a bad idea to save all your articles as simple text files on your hard drive or removable storage device as well as on your blog. Whether you wrote the articles yourself or had someone else do it, there’s a lot of value in those words, and just in case something major happens, you will still have all your primary work safely stored in multiple locations.