Don't Wait Until Your Update Crashes to Learn About Backing up Your Site

If you’ve ever had an update go wrong, you know the importance of having a solid back-up plan for your website. If you haven’t then count your blessings. However, if you don't have a back-up plan in place for your site files and your database you could be in a lot of trouble should something go wrong with your update.

It doesn’t matter what content management system you use. They all have periodic updates that need to be done - whether it’s updating to the latest release to get additional features, or it’s a much needed security update. Modules and plugins have updates too and they also need to be updated.

Unless you want to spend many hours sifting through the wreckage of what was once your site trying to put the pieces back together you need to have a good plan for backing up your site’s files and database.

Here are a couple ways to build your back-up plan.

Just Do It. Yourself.

Okay - sorry for the old-school Nike pun. But it really is easy to "just do it yourself". Connect to your website host via FTP and download all your site files. I do this regularly, and always before I do a major update. Just create a folder on your computer somewhere - you could put it on an external storage drive, or just a folder in your documents. If you have sufficient space, you can keep your compressed back-ups on your hosting account in a folder where you’ll remember where they are. You don't necessarily need to keep generations of backups, just the most recent stable version. Then you need to connect to your database make a backup. You should have a PHPMyAdmin link in your control panel - or something like it - where you can connect to your database. Before you get in to that though, open a support ticket with your host and ask them to give you the guidelines/best practices for your particular set up so that you can make periodic backups. Just ask Bo - he knows.

Let Your Site do it for you.

WordPress is fairly easy to back up. Their website has some outstanding resources on different ways and means by which to get this done.

However if you prefer a slightly less-involved means of doing your back-ups there is a plugin for WordPress called WP-DB-Backup that you can use. This takes your core database and creates back-ups and gives you the ability to create them on demand. This backs up your database only - it doesn’t back up your site files, but doing that is incredibly easy as noted above. There are a couple others for WordPress too:

Drupal is also incredibly easy to back up and restore. I use the Backup and Migrate module on all of my Drupal sites. It’s simple easy to use and easy to implement. There is even a fantastic video tutorial on how to use Backup and Migrate.

Pay Someone to do it.

Taking things a step further, you can subscribe to a service and just have them do it for you. This is really a solution probably best recommended for larger, higher traffic sites, but certainly wouldn’t be limited to them. Here are a couple back-up services that you may want to take a look at:

  • SiteAutoBackup.com backs up unlimited domains, sites, and databases every day
  • BackupBuddy is a premium WP plugin that backs up, restores, and provides for migration of your WordPress site.
  • VaultPress is a backup service from the creators of WordPress that provides full website backup and security for WordPress sites.
  • MyRepono is another that I've heard of but don't know too much about. It's a premium website backup service that is usable with several CMS platforms

You don’t want to be learning about backups and restorations after a crash or faulty update. Get a plan and get after making your backups!

Do you have a website backup plan or service that you use that I didn’t cover? I’d love to hear about it - let me know in the comments below.