Keep Your Website Safe & Secure — Make regular backups for security

(Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes)

Backing up your website is an important chore that should do on a regular basis. If you get hacked, or the data center where you’re hosted goes down hard (very rare, but it does happen*), you will be very, very glad you took the time. Each WordPress installation requires two types of backups: database and file system. The database backup is easily handled using a WordPress plugin designed expressly for backup purposes. Backing up the file system takes a little more effort, and requires a little more computer savvy. But not much more.

Automatic file system backups

Backing up a remote file system (which is what we’re doing here) isn’t particularly difficult, and there are several ways to do it. The most automatic way to actually do regular backups is to write an rsync script that runs a cron job downloading the remote files into a local directory whence the changes are uploaded into 3rd party subversion repository… Did you get all that?

No?

Ok, that’s the easiest way to handle it long term…
…but it’s the hardest way to learn!

Easy backups

Let’s learn something easy instead, something you can use for years on most “entrepreneurial-sized” web sites. Instead of all that unix hackery, we’ll use Filezilla, a graphical, easy-to-use FTP client available on both Windows and MacIntosh. If you don’t have Filezilla installed, go ahead and grab it. It’s free software and open source, so you can trust the code. (If you’re comfortable using FTP and have your own FTP client by all means use that instead.)

Here’s a picture of you need to do:

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| Web Site |   <====>    | Your PC |   <====>  | Backup Site |
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The idea is to copy all the WordPress web site files to your personal computer, then back those files up to something else, perhaps a network backup site, or burn them to a DVD, it doesn’t really matter as long as you have a copy secured elsewhere to prevent total devastation during force majeure conditions!

Right now, choose a place on your personal computer where you will store your WordPress backup files. One good place on MS Windows computers is the My Documents folder. Many people (and companies) back this entire folder up on a regular basis, so storing it there makes it easier for you. But where you put your backups is not as important as making sure you put them 1. where you can find and they won’t get deleted, and 2. backing this local copy to a 3rd place.

Next, use your FTP client and log into the website host. Once you are logged in, change your view to the directory where WordPress is installed.

Copy everything!

It should take only a few minutes on a medium fast connection, and you will have every file stored on your personal computer.

Now copy everything from your local computer to the 3rd remote computer, and you’re done.

Here’s a couple of helpful hints:

1. Back up on a regular schedule. It’s a chore, plan for it.
2. If you can do a 3 way FTP transfer, go ahead and copy the WordPress to the remote host directly if you don’t want them on your personal computer.

So, how did it go? Did you get everything backed up?

If not, or if you have any questions, add a comment below and I’ll explain it better.

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* A data center in Texas that hosted a very popular project management web application went down recently. The tornado was just the start of the problem… evidently someone then ran into a power pole which put the facility on emergency generator power, which ran hot… setting off the sprinkler system… you get the idea.

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Tagged as: Backups, File management