If you’ve never felt the pain of losing your site to a mishap, trust me when I say you don’t want to know what that feels like. If you don’t have a backup plan for your website, sooner or later you may find out for yourself what it’s like to lose hours of hard work in an instant.
If you run WordPress websites you are in luck. There are two very easy to use plugins you can use for backup management of your website:
- WP DB Backup – Backs up your WordPress database.
- WordPress Backup – Backs up important folders and files. (When searching plugins, look for the one from “Blog Traffic Exchange” in the plugin description.)
I found this excellent demo video that walks you through set up and configuration of these two backup plugins:
Notes
You can also use FTP to backup your files and phpMyAdmin to backup your database instead of using these plugins.
At 8:32 in the video, the presenter mistakenly changes the folder permission on the wp-content folder to ’777′. He catches his error but doesn’t change the folder back to ’755′, which is what it should be. He probably changed it back after the video, I just don’t want anyone to think you can leave this folder at 777.
If you get a blank or white screen from using the WordPress Backup plugin, it might be a settings issue. Refer to the plugin developer’s instructions, which also includes what to put in the .htaccess text file.
If using these plugins to move from one web host to another, you may find you cannot upload images and other media to your new site. This is because the old Media folder path is still in the database. Go to Media -> Uploading Files to change the folder path. If you’re not sure what the new path is, you can try logging to your web host control panel’s file manager and taking a look at your folders.
If you have any questions, please leave a comment.
