Backup Your Own Website

Why YOU Need to Backup the Site

We tend not to think about or prepare for digital disaster. How many people have a detailed strategy prepared for if their computer suddenly loses all of its data, or something happens to their website, or email, etc.? Very few. We’re all only human.

But what if it does happen? Can you rely on your web host? Or your web designer? Maybe. Maybe not. Typically, hosting companies like Hostgator and web design firms like Alamoxie try to backup the site, but make sure to warn you, the client, that you need to make your own backups. Why? Because things happen. All too often, the backup method itself fails… or perhaps the backup was saved right after an attack crippled your site, or any number of other eventualities could happen. The point is, don’t rely on any one source to make your backups.

Types of Backups

A WordPress website is made up of two basic parts: files and a database. To divide it up a bit further, you have:

• The WordPress installation (to recover, just reinstall WordPress)
• Plugin files (to recover, reinstall the plugin, or save and restore the plugin directory)
• Media files (if your images, videos and audio files reside on your own server, make sure to have them saved elsewhere too–usually on your local computer)
• Database (easy to backup, can take a little skill to restore)

Let’s say that you copy every file on your web server to your computer. Not only is this not really necessary (why backup the easily-replaceable files of the WordPress installation), but this is not your entire website. (But do make sure to backup those media files!)

The database stores the real content of your website. Every page and post, plugin settings, website settings, all the comments, different users and so on are all part of the database. Again: except for media files, all your site content is in the database. The files just control some of what the content looks like.

How to Backup Your Site

For regularly updating websites, I recommend the iDrive WordPress plugin. It’s free and automatically backs up both the files and database online for the past ten days, making a new backup every 24 hours that replaces the oldest backup.

There are numerous plugins you can use to backup the files, database or both. However, there’s another backup method as well. In your WordPress dashboard, you can go to the “Tools” menu, then to “export.” From there you can export a version of your site content as a downloadable file–and then easily restore it again by going to “Tools,” then “Import.” For sites that don’t update frequently, it can be a good idea to do this whenever you make significant changes to the site.