Automated Backups for WordPress

On November 11th McColo was turned off for hosting many spam, child porn, and malware sites (article at WashingtonPost.com). But there were more than a few legitimate sites hosted there as well. And now they’re scrambling to rebuild their blogs, sites, and all their content somewhere else. The depressing thing is thinking about how much work the legitimate (and now down) sites are going thru without a good backup to recover with. So they’re in tough times right now.

But by taking action now and ensuring you have automated backup to internet for your WordPress sites you are protecting yourself. We looked around and put together five simple steps that anyone with a WordPress site can use to ensure a frequent, secure, and safe backup.

Automated WordPress Backup to Internet

A. First off, choose the email address you want to use to receive the initial backups. As long as you download email to your computer (using Outlook, SeaMonkey, etc.) you will receive your backups automatically.

B. You can do this by setting up a CRON job manually, or you can download a couple handy plugins (WP-DB-Backup and WP-Cron) to do the job for you. Get both plugins downloaded, unzipped, and loaded to your WordPress plugins folder and activate them in your WordPress plugin management page. A variety of plugins are included with WP-Cron. Just activate the ones called WP-Cron and WP-DB-Backup.

C. Click the “Manage” tab in WordPress now that the plugins are activated. You’ll see a menu item called “Backup”. You want this one. There are various settings for doing a manual backup. Skip that and go to the section titled “Scheduled Backup” (at the bottom). If you don’t see it, you don’t have WP-Cron enabled, so make sure it is. In the settings for this section, set the schedule to “Daily” (or whatever timeframe is appropriate for your site). Use the address you decided to use where it says “Email backup to:”. Finally, you’ll have the option to include non-core WP SQL tables. We think backing them all up is a safe choice. All WordPress native tables is the default setting for the plugin. After you’ve selected any other tables, click Submit.

D. Now, the FailSafe part. Grab yourself a copy of OPENRSM CloudBackup. It’s reliable, secure, and most flexible backup to internet product we’ve tried. Setup for Windows, MAC, and Linux are all equally dead simple. Make sure to select the options for backing up your email folders (and anything else you need to backup). Click “Daily” to set the schedule.

E. There you go, that’s it! Your WordPress SQL backups should be emailed to you and they’ll be using the backup to internet features of CloudBackup to make sure you don’t lose your site. Check the account and see the first backups happen. You can now quit worrying and let the plugins, your email account, and CloudBackup do all the work. Just make sure to delete older backups from your email occasionally and your work is done.

And if your host should go down? Recovery is easy and fast, and your not suffering like the lost souls that were hosting their legitimate sites at McColo.

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