Category Archives: Back Up Wordpress Blog

Back Up Wordpress Blog, WordPress

A Short Post About WordPress

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If you have a WordPress site, and millions of people do, you should make sure that you backup your database on a regular basis. If you post every day, you should do this at least once a week. The frequency depends on you. How important is your work? How many posts do you want to lose?

TIP: In case you didn’t know, all of your posts are NOT in your wp_content folder. Your precious posts, all of your hard work, are in the MySql database. If you backup your WordPress installation or copy a few folders to your computer, you will still lose your posts if disaster strikes. Keep that in mind.

Yesterday, a backup from our hosting company, Fatcow by name, saved our bacon. We’d gone ahead and tried to move this site to another hosting account, still with Fatcow, but managed to screw it up totally. By late yesterday afternoon, most of our posts were either missing completely or were cut off in the middle. This morning we imported a database backup from two days ago and, thank goodness, everything is back to normal. Yes, we lost one post but that’s better than losing over 300, isn’t it?

How do you backup your database? It’s relatively simple but it depends on which software your hosting company is using. Fatcow uses vDeck. We’re used to CPanel but vDeck isn’t that much different. Each ‘panel’, no matter which one your hosting company uses, has full instructions for each type of job you need to do.

When you are backing up your database, don’t depend solely on a WordPress plugin. We’d been trusting a plugin for about six months, only to find that it was emailing us empty attachments that were useless when we attempted to restore our database. If a plugin works for you, fine, but perform your own backup on a regular basis.

After you create these backups using the automatic tools that your host makes available from your account, make sure you make copies of them. We use Dropbox but it’s a good idea to put them on a flashdrive as well. We’d recommend keeping three or four backups on hand at any one time.

That’s it for this post. Here’s a shot of vDeck so you can see what you’re into with FatCow:

Photo of vDeck Control Panel
Point and click is pretty much what you’ve got here.

 

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Back Up Wordpress Blog, Backing up your computer, Computers, WordPress

Easy WordPress Backup

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Backing up a WordPress blog isn’t as difficult as you might think. Sure, there are many plug-ins available which will back-up your WordPress databases but if you just want to keep a copy of your posts, here’s how to do it.

Head to your WordPress blog and click on the word Tools on the left hand side of the page. You’ll either see a pop-out on the right if you just hover the mouse over the word Tools or you will see this if you click the word:

Photo of Available Tools
We’re looking to Export here so click on that.

Since we’re trying to keep a record of our posts, we’ll choose Export. If we wanted to insert these posts into the blog, we would choose Import. This is what you’ll see next:

Photo showing WordPress Tools
You can choose to back up everything or just your posts and/or pages.

You can choose to download All Content or just your posts. Whichever you choose, WordPress will quickly get an .xml file ready for you and it will automatically download that file to your computer, usually to your Download folder or the folder you have chosen for downloads. Once there, you can open the file with whatever program Windows has set up to deal with .xml files. Here, Adobe Dreamweaver opens them but you could use Safari or Chrome or even Notepad. The file you download is full of ‘markup’ language, hence the name, but you will be able to find all of your words very easily.

Once you have the file saved,  you don’t have to do anything with it. It’s a back up. Your site is still running, your WordPress installation is still working perfectly but now you can relax, knowing that all of your posts have been saved. They won’t get lost in a server crash. If, god forbid, that ever happens, you’ll be able to copy and paste all of your posts into your new WordPress blog. You’ll have to do them one by one but, hey, at least you won’t have to rewrite every post.

Now don’t misunderstand us. We use plug-ins to back-up our databases and, of course, our hosting company saves back-ups as well. We were looking for an easy way to save all of our posts and this works very well. Try it, you’ll rest easy knowing that nothing is lost.

Thanks for reading!