Backup Your WordPress Blog Regularly
My friend Damien Riley sent me an email the other day reminding friends to backup your wordpress blogs manually at least once a month as there have been hackers compromising wordpress blogs recently. Doing Entrecard dropping last week I did see some blogs that were hijacked and instead had scrolling Arabic characters on them instead of the typical blog homepage. Most of the ones I have seen hacked were blogspot blogs, but WordPress is also susceptible. So I recommend my readers backup their wordpress blogs weekly, unless you can afford to lose up to a month’s worth of posts and comments, which I know I can’t lose that much without severe impact.
There are several ways with which you need to backup your wordpress files. The first and most important is to export everything from your WP-Admin GUI:
In WordPress click on your Tools -> Export menu:
Via the export method you will be backing up your posts, pages, comments, custom fields, tags and categories into an XML file that you can save to your desktop.
You can choose to export all admin’s posts (or narrow it down to only specific posts by admin).
This will preserve and save all of your content and completes the first and most important step.
Now, you may want to additionally backup your themes, plug-ins, images and anything else that is physically stored on your blog’s web server. In order to accomplish this step you will need to be able to access your wordpress blog server via FTP, SSH or SCP. Once you access your account, you will want to copy over your entire / folder or /wp-content folder and store it locally on your computer or in another folder on your wordpress blog.
I have a dreamhost account and have direct SSH access to my web server, so I just log into my blog server 1x per week and issue the following:
tar cfp dragonblogger-backup.tar dragonblogger/ which tar archives all of my dragonblogger web site files.
I then do
gzip -9 dragonblogger-backup.tar to compress my tar archive so that it takes up less space on the server.
I highly recommend you backup your wordpress content and files 1x per week if you post every day, if you only post weekly, then 1x per month may be sufficient for you.
-Dragon Blogger
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