It can never be said often enough: Backup your blog!
There are two things to keep in mind here:
- Your posts, comments, trackbacks, link lists, categories and WordPress option settings are all stored in the MYSQL database on your web server account
- The images you’ve uploaded, the plugins you’ve installed and the theme templates you’ve uploaded are not stored in your MYSQL database
Why is this important? Because when you back up your blog, you essentially need to do two things:
- Back up the MYSQL database to ensure you’ve backed up all your blog data and option settings
- Backup any images, plugins and themes so you have backups of those, as well
These two things require two different methods. Let’s do the easy one first:
Backing up the images, plugins and theme files
Easiest way to do this is via FTP and downloading the images directory, plugin directory and themes directory to your own local computer hard drive. Plugins and Themes can be found in /wp-content/pugins/ and /wp-content/themes/, respectively. The images, on the other hand, will depend on how you’ve uploaded images to your blog site. If you’ve used the WordPress image uploader to upload all images, then check the image upload directory under Options then Miscellaneous in the WordPress administration panel to check what your images path is (default: /wp-content/uploads/).
Back up your MYSQL Database via phpMyAdmin
phpMyAdmin is probably the most popular database management systems and most web hosts offer it as a way to manage your database. Backing up your WordPress database is pretty easy using phpMyAdmin - it’s not as complicated as it may look, at first. If you’re unsure how to access your phpMyAdmin on your account, contact your hosting provider, they will be able to tell you how to access it through your account manager.
Once you login, you will see a link labeled “Databases”:
Click the Databases link and a page loads with a list of databases on your account (assuming you have more than one, like I do. If you only have one - only one link to that database will appear here):
Once you’ve clicked on the database that you wish to back up, it loads a new page that lists out the tables within that database. Click the “Export” tab at the top of the page:
You can pretty much leave the default settings the way they appear when you load the export page - however, have a look at my screenshot below for a guide on how the settings should be set for the export:
Click the “Go” button and you will be prompted to choose a location on your own local computer to download the file to. Choose your location and download the file to your computer.
Wala! Your database is backed up to your own local computer.
Remember the information at the beginning of this post: By backing up your database, you have not backed up your WordPress Themes, WordPress Plugins or ANY of the images you have posted to your blog!
I’ll discuss what to do with a database back up in a later post - but once you have it, if anything - your web host should know how to restore it, if you ever need to do that.
Recommended back up schedule? At least once a week — more if you post heavily to your blog, or get a LOT of comments.
