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Maintaining your WordPress website requires insuring against accidents, or worse, getting maliciously hacked. The best insurance is a system for regular backups. Backing up WordPress requires a scheme for managing:
- database backups, and
- file system backups.
Database backups are the easier of the two, and several plugins exist that make regularly backing up your WordPress database. File system backups are a little trickier: there aren’t as many plugins, and you have to decide what, exactly, you want to back up from the file system, which requires understanding a little bit about how WordPress is organized on disk.
WordPress Codex on backing up
Before we get started, you need to go read ALL the information on WordPress backups. Once you get back, we’ll dig into some of the details. Pay very close attention to WordPress site backups, which is the subject of this post.
Note that the documentation on the Codex is inconsistent between “file” and “site.” If you’re a little confused, you should be. I’m wearing my academic hat now, and were I peer reviewing, there would be a tiny mandatory change before accepting for publication.
But some inaccuracy and inconsistency is fine for web publication written and maintained by purely volunteer efforts. Also, you may read this article in the future, and the inconsistency may have been fixed. Or the web page moved or deleted. It’s the web!
In any case, we’re dealing with the stuff that sits on the file system. Files and directories. Themes, plugins, the WordPress core, all of your uploads such as images, etc.
Backing up the file system
From the WordPress backups page, we have these three options for the file system:
- Website Host Provided Backup Software.
I’m hosting at bluehost.com, which provides two backup solutions, one manual and one automatic. The manual backup allows backing up your complete file system. Overkill: we’re just looking for specific WordPress files. You should grab backups of your email configuration any other databases using this interface. The automatic “Wizard” interface probably simplifies the process, at the expense of generating larger and less specific backups.
- Create Synchs With Your Site.Third party commercial programs such as 2Bright Sparks’s Synchback and WinSCP can help you backup your WordPress file system. These and similar programs perform synchronization to make sure the remote files and the backed up files remain up to date.
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Copy Your Files to Your Desktop using a local client such as FTP or scp. This is the easiest way to keep backups: just copy everything from your host to your local computer. Smart bears will periodically copy the files from their computer onto a CD or DVD, to provide an extra set of backups in case everything goes completely pear-shaped.
Even smarter bears will create a document control repository using a tool such as Subversion or Git, and synchronize the backup into the repository. This is not difficult to do at all. If you would like more information or some help setting up such a repository, use the contact form with subject: “Backup Help!” (offer ends July 15 2009).
Any of these methods will work well. The most important thing is to simply pick on method and get started on regular backups.
What’s your method?
A challenge for the reader, and a small offer: How do YOU handle file backups? Have I missed anything? Let me know in the comments. Here’s the offer, but a little background first… writing about backups is almost as boring as actually doing backups. I just do what I do, and it happens, and all the tedious stuff I don’t want to write about… I don’t even think about. If I’m just a little too thin on any explanation above, feel free to contact me where you’re having trouble. I’ll help you figure it out, and I’ll fill in the thin parts of the explanation while I’m at it. That’s free help for you, and we both benefit.
This article was written as part of the WordPress 101 challenge: Andy Black (Productive Unix) used his coupon to suggest discussing WordPress backups. Go get your coupon now, there’s only two left!
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{ 4 comments }
Hey Dave!
There’s a fascinating discussion covering the self same subject at http://www.solostream.com/2010/how-to-back-up-your-wordpress-site-consistently-and-automatically/ – gotta be worth a look.
Dave Thackeray´s last blog ..10 things to take this week into orbit
Thanks, Dave. I’ll take a look at it when I revise these articles on backups.
Dr Wordpress!´s last blog ..Search Your Blog Network With Google Custom Search
I also use bluehost, and downloaded files, but I’m not positive I got everything I need…
I downloaded these files:
prefix_wrdp1.sql
prefix_wrdp2.sql
prefix_wrdp3.sql
(I have 2 installations of wordpress, so I think wrdp1 is my wife’s and wrdp3 is mine…I don’t know what wrdp2 is.)
aliases-consciousme.com.gz
aliases-phoxiephoto.com.gz
filter-consciousme.com.gz
filter-phoxiephoto.com.gz
backup-phoxiephoto.com-1-17-2010.tar.gz (which is 212 megabytes)
a little blurb about exactly what files you’re downloading would be really helpful on this post, since the WP Codex just says to check with your host.
Carlos Velez´s last blog ..Direction, Not Perfection: The Truth In Movement
The “sql” files are your database files.
Poke around in “prefix_wrdp2.sql” you will see the blog title and url. My hunch is that it’s a failed or stopped installation.
Take a look into the gzipped files to see what they contain. If you’re on a Mac, you should be able to gunzip these at the command line. On Windows, there are free or very inexpensive programs for unzipping gzipped files.
In your case, you should find your themes, uploads and plugins directories.
Dr Wordpress!´s last blog ..When B.L.O.G. Turns into J.O.B. – Downshift and accelerate
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