Easy 5 Step Automation of WordPress Backups

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Saturday, November 22nd, 2008 Subscribe To Our Feed

On November 11th McColo was turned off for hosting many spam, child porn, and malware sites (article at WashingtonPost.com). Although a small percentage, there were legitimates sites hosted there. And now they’re scrambling to rebuild their blogs, sites, and all their content somewhere else. The discouraging thing is thinking about how many sites use Wordpress and all of the legitimate ones now trying to rebuild didn’t have good backup. So they’re in tough times right now.

But you can take action now and get that Wordpress site uploading itself to email and then backup to internet for rock solid security. We worked out a simple five step process of automating your WordPress backups that anyone can use.

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 automate the process with WP-DB-Backup and WP-Cron (google and download) or you can set up a CRON job manually (don’t do that). Get both plugins downloaded, unzipped, and loaded to your WordPress plugins folder and activate them in your WordPress plugin management page. WP-Cron comes with a whole bunch of different plugins. 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”. This is the desired one. There are some optional settings for doing manual backups. Skip that and go to the section titled “Scheduled Backup” (at the bottom). You need to make sure to enable WP-Cron (if it’s visible, it’s enabled). In the settings for this section, set the schedule to “Daily” (or whatever timeframe is appropriate for your site). Where it says “Email Backup To:” put in your email address (Step A). Finally, you’ll have the option to include non-core WP SQL tables. We think that backing them all up is the safe choice. The plugin’s default is to backup all native WordPress tables. After selecting any other tables, click Submit.

D. Now the Rock Solid part. Grab yourself a copy of OPENRSM CloudBackup. It’s a backup to internet service that’s reliable and easy. Setup is easy for MAC, Windows, and Linux users alike. Just make sure to select the options for backing up your email folders (different on Windows, MAC, and Linux but it’s obvious and easy). Now you should set the schedule, click “Daily”.

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 backup and see it churn out the backup. 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 server should crash? Fast and easy recovery is now enabled and your not worrying what will happen to you if your host goes away.

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