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Launch Your Own Website – Part Nine: Backup Your Site!

Written by kevin

This is Part Nine of my article series entitled “Launch Your Own Website”

The series is based on my practical experience in launching my own site.

Part Nine explains how you can get some low-cost and effective backup procedures in place for your website.

Set up a Backup Procedure for Your Site

It’s extremely important to make sure your website is backed up regularly. You’ll be investing hundreds, possibly thousands of man hours in creating and maintaining your site.

Sites get hacked, servers fail, file systems get corrupted. You can even easily delete your own content by mistake. When disaster strikes and you have no backup available, then you have a double disaster on your hands.

If you backup, you probably won’t need the backups. But if you don’t – you sure as anything will!

I make that statement a little tongue-in-cheek. In reality of course we can never be sure what’s going to happen in the future.

But it’s for precisely that reason that we need to have some form of “insurance” to save us if disaster should suddenly strike at some time in the future. Which is we need to ensure that we have up-to-date backups of our site available at all times.

Fortunately for WordPress users it’s not difficult to backup your site. Once you’ve configured the backup routines you only need to invest a few minutes administrative overhead each week in maintaining the backups. There are a number of different ways of backing up your website. The problem is that none of them are entirely satisfactory in themselves. Each of them comes with it’s own pros and cons. However, an imperfect backup solution is better than no backup solution.

TIP! Ask your Web-hosting provider to back up your server space regularly

The first thing I recommend you do is to arrange with your web hosting provider to perform automatic backup of your web space. This will cost just a couple of dollars extra a month and it’s money well spent.

This doesn’t help you though if your web hosting provider suffers a catastrophic data loss at their site. So you need to have a system in place to create regular offsite backups as well.

There are a number of backup solutions that integrate with WordPress. Some are paid-for solutions and others are available for free. The free versions vary from buggy and inadequate to reasonable and reliable.

None of the free versions are 100 percent perfect (but then neither are the paid-for versions in all cases) , but there are two very good free solutions which I can recommend and which will probably be sufficient to cover most of your backup requirements. These are the DB-Backup Plugin and the Time Machine Plugin.

Installing the WordPress DB-Backup Plugin

The basic and standard way of backing up a WordPress site is to use the DB-Backup Plugin. This is very simple to get running and provides for regular automated offsite backups of your website.

The problem with DB-Backup is that it only backs up the the MySQL database of your site. This is the database that holds all your site’s posts and pages. However it doesn’t hold your WordPress theme and all the other plugins and structural configuration information that you have spent a lot of time and effort on installing.

These extra but vital items for your site will at least be backed up – albeit onsite – by your web hosting provider’s automatic backup routine. Assuming that you have requested them to perform this service. Note however that this is only an onsite backup.

Nevertheless, I still recommend that you first install and configure DB-Backup. You can download it free from:

wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-db-backup

Installation is simple. Full instructions can be found at the above link.

Create a manual backup of your site straight away!

Once you’ve installed it, you can access it via the WordPress Dashboard under Tools -> Backup.

I recommend you first create a manual backup straightaway using WP-DB-Backup.

There are three options for this:

save the backup on your server;
download straight to your PC; or
send it to a designated email account

The backup routine runs very quickly (for a small site a minute or so). Don’t close the browser during the operation or the backup will be interrupted.

Next, schedule your backups to run automatically

The most useful and time saving feature of WP-DB-Backup is it’s ability to backup your site automatically at regular intervals.

How often should you backup?

This depends on how often your site’s content changes.

If you have a completely static site which never changes, then a one off backup is sufficient. In this case you don’t need to bother with configuring a backup schedule.

However, most websites – especially blogs, have dynamic content which is modified or added to regularly.This is definitely the case if you are launching a blog-type website. How often the content of your site changes will determine how often you should backup.

How to configure DB-Backup

Choose the schedule in WP-DB-Backup that best suits your site’s content publishing level.

Next scroll up the page back to the Backup Options box and determine what should be done with the backup.

Once again, WP-DB-Backup gives you three options:

save the backup on your server;
download straight to your PC; or
mail it to a designated email account

Note that you can only choose ONE option for this!

In addition to WP-Backup, you should arrange some backups at a third-party location.

Maintain off site backups as well

I recommend you set WP-backup to download the backup to your PC or to an email account that is NOT on your web hosting server. This is because if you save the backup on your server, then all your backups are located on the same machine as your website.

If disaster strikes at the file system, operating system or hardware level, then not only your website, but also your backup will be lost.

Remember the first golden rule of backups:

The First Golden Rule of Backups:

Never Put All Your Eggs in One Basket!

I suggest sending your backup to a specially created email account. This ensures you always have an OFFSITE backup. Plus it’s free -so take advantage of the opportunity.

DON’T use an email account on your server or website – this would defeat the whole point of the backup. It needs to be on a separate account at a separate location. You can use one of the free popular web mail providers such as Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail.

You can then also transfer your backups, or some of them, to your PC and to a cloud storage provider, for example once a week or once a month.

Open a free account with Dropbox

Dropbox is an online cloud storage service. You can use it to backup files from your PC and from your website. Dropbox integrates into your filesystem on your PC, so you can easily add files by point and click in your File Explorer.

Dropbox is free for the first 2GB, so take advantage of this and grab yourself a free account straightaway if you haven’t already done so.

Maintain multiple backup copies on different media

Once you have the above measures in place, in particular, keeping backups of your site with a cloud storage provider such as Dropbox, your sites should be fairly secure. However, I also like to have a backup of my sites in my own personal possession.

For example, you can hold a copy on your PC or laptop. You can also hold a copy on a DVD or a USB stick. But guard them carefully. Because of their small size they have a tendency to easily get mislaid or lost.

Another good backup method is to use an external USB hard drive and store a copy of your backups on it.

Dropbox are at www.dropbox.com

Installing WP Time Machine Plugin

There’s also a plugin called Time Machine which enables you to regularly backup your site and have it sent across the net to your Dropbox account completely automatically.

The great thing about this method is that, like DB Backup, it runs automatically and it enables you to save the data to a file system – in this case, Dropbox, which you can then access directly from your PC or laptop’s own file system, as well as via a web browser from anywhere.

Also, once you have it up and running, it takes care of itself and you don’t have to concern yourself with arranging backups every time. I know from experience that this is essential when you are putting a backup procedure in place, because otherwise it’s all too easy to skip the task of backing up your site or sites when you have other, more urgent, things to do.

1. Download & Install WP Time Machine

You can get the plugin from the WordPress.org website at wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-time-machine/

Install it on your site via the your site’s WordPress Dashboard plugin installation section. Next you need to click on “enable” to activate the plugin.

2. Configure WP Time Machine

Click on Settings -> WP Time Machine. Next click “Show Plugin Options” and select Dropbox as the current offsite service. Enter your Dropbox email and Dropbox password details.

You can also specify a directory where your backups are to be saved. The default is the root folder. Make sure you don’t select “public” because this is readable to everyone!

Important! Make sure that you enter the email address that your Dropbox account is registered with.

Also, after you have entered your Dropbox password, make sure you click on “Save your password”. Otherwise your password won’t be saved in the Time Machine configuration and your backup won’t be able to run!

3. Create an initial archive with WP Time Machine

To do this click on “Generate WP Time Machine Archive”. A folder should appear with some files inside in your Dropbox area on your computer. If this does not appear then check that you have entered your Dropbox details correctly.

4. Set the automated backup routine for WP Time Machine

This step is a little more complex. At present this has to be done by using a Linux Shell command (operating system command) called “curl” which is run on your webserver at the Linux or Unix system level.

If you aren’t familiar with Linux or Unix then the easiest thing to do is to ask your web hosting provider to take care of this for you. Most hosting providers will perform this task for you without any problems.

Just send them a mail or contact them via their online help desk and tell them that you want to use the WordPress Time Machine Plugin to carry out automated backups of your site to Dropbox and that to do this you need them to enter a specified “curl command” into the crontab system of your webserver.

You can send them the command by email so they will know what needs to be entered.

This is the curl command that your web hosting provider will need to enter into your crontab file:

curl “http://mysitename.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-time-machine/cron.php?generate=1″

Your own site name will need to be substituted in the command in place of “mysitename.com”

You’ll also need to tell them when you want the backup to run: in other words, what days of the week and at what time.

For example, you can specifiy the backup to run once a week. Or, if you publish to your site more regularly, then daily may be better. It’s also best to choose a quieter time eg the early hours of the morning, for the backup to run.

If you are familiar with Linux/Unix, then here are the instructions:

The “curl” command has to be entered into your web server’s crontab file. This will usually be accessible via your web server hosting user panel.

You need to enter the command into the crontab section and specify when it is to run (usually this is done via clicking on radio buttons or entering times and days or selecting them from a set of drop-down field).

Decide how often you want your Time Machine backup to run and enter the times and days accordingly in the crontab section.

The curl command line you need to enter into your crontab section needs to look like this:

curl “http://mysitename.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-time-machine/cron.php?generate=1″

You will of course need to substitute the exact name of your own site in place of “mysitename.com”. Otherwise make sure you enter the command exactly as above.

And with that, you should have an automated backup system in place for your website that will generate regular reliable backups you without any intervention being necessary by you.

All the above might sound a little like overkill. But believe me, it’s not. Where backups are concerned you should always observe the Second Golden Rule…

The Second Golden Rule of Backups: Take nothing for granted!

Even backups themselves can and do fail. Backup servers, hard drives, USB sticks, DVDs, CDROMs, can all develop sudden read/write problems. Be safe and use a variety of different backup media.

That’s why we need to make sure that we have these different levels of backup in place. So that if one backup fails, we always have another one we can turn to.

Getting backup procedures in place initially might seem like grunt work with little visible reward – and it is. At least initially, when your site is running smoothly as most sites do most of the time.

But when your website or web server suddenly suffers a disaster you’ll be glad you made the effort earlier on. Your site is valuable intellectual property and investment and you can’t afford not to back it up.

So take a little time whilst the waters are calm right now to get these automated procedures in place ready for when a storm brews up.

When disaster suddenly strikes you’ll be glad you did!

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