Xavier Media®

If you've been following my mini-series on how to secure your cPanel account you should have a look at the guest article I've written for Moms Cash Blog. I love the articles at Moms Cash Blog and it looks like JJ from Moms Cash Blog sometimes visit this blog too .

Backup your blog

Back to on how to secure your blog….. If you don't have cPanel as hosting control panel for your blog there are other ways to make backups of your valuable data. You could for example use a WordPress plugin to do the backups for you.

I've tested a plugin called WP-DB-Backup and it's doing everything you need from a backup plugin. It also got good ratings at WordPress.org with 4 stars of 5 possible.

The installation is as easy as for any other WordPress plugin. You just upload the files into your /wp-content/plugins directory and activate the plugin in the dashboard (under the plugin tab). In some cases you may have to make your /wp-content/ directory writable since the plugin will try to create a directory called /wp-content/backup-*/.

Once you have activated the plugin you should setup it to do backups on a regular basis. In the dashboard click on "Manage" and "Backups".

As default all the standard WordPress tables are selected which means that they will be backed up by the plugin. If you have more tables in the same database (for other WordPress plugins or even other softwares like forums etc) you can check those tables to be included in your backups . This means that if you for example got a forum or several blogs in the same database you only need to run this plugin at one of your blogs to get a complete backup of your entire database.

How to do a manual backup

To do a manual backup of your database simply scroll down until you find the following backup options:

I suggest that you never use the first option "Save to server" since that means that you wil have your backup in the exact same account as your live database. You may also expose your backup to hackers in an  easy way since you can download the backup using a standard web browser without any hacking experience at all

Since this is a manual backup you may want to download it to your computer or send it to your email account. I recommend that you setup a separate email account at for example Gmail.com or Yahoo where you send your backups. That way you don't have to worry about hard drive failure on your own computer, you can also access your backups on any computer.

Automated backups

Since manual backups needs to be done manual and sometimes you will forget to do a manual backup this plugin got an option where you can let the plugin email your backups to you on a regular basis. Scroll down on the backup page until you find this screen:

When you activate this option the plugin will email you a backup file of your database on the schedule you've selected. If you for example post several times per day (at least 6 or 8 times) then you can have an hourly backup emailed to you, but in most cases a daily backup will be just fine. On the above screen you can see when next backup will be done and if it's not a good time for you then you can change it. If you post at almost the same time every day, then I would suggest to do the backup about an hour after that time. That way you minimize the risk of loosing your last post.

As for the manual backup option I suggest you setup an email account only for backups. That way you can have easly access to your backups and you don't have to search thru tons of emails just to find the latest backup. The important thing when you setup an email account for your backups is to make sure the email account is hosted on another physical server then your hosting account.

About the author
Andreas co-founded Xavier Media® in 1996 and has since been involved in all kinds of development, marketing and making money online.