When the pedal is to the metal and your list of things to setup and configure is long, thinking about a backup strategy is the last thing on your mind. As anyone who has used any piece of IT hardware you know, sorry, you learned that you need to backup. It’s not for the if it happens, its for the when it happens.
Thinking about our use of wordpress and how we are extending its use beyond just a blog editor, it dawned on me that we really need some automated tools in place. For the themes, plugins, uploads and specifically to the database tables.
We regularly tweak something in the blog theme/setup and take that opportunity to make a backup to a dev machine, as for automated backups we have selected wordpress-backup by Blog Traffic Exchange to take care of the system files.You simply create a directory in the wp-content folder, set the permissions, set an interval for the backups to occur and an if your blog is small enough, set an email address to receive off-server backups.
We have a formal database backup strategy in place for the entire site, but to have an additional one just for the wordpress side sounded like a great idea. We selected WordPress Database Backup by Austin Matzko as a full featured solution. Once again create a directory on the server, they suggest the wp-content folder, set the permissions, set an interval for the backups to occur and where you would like the backups to be delivered. It can backup and download to you computer immediately, store of the server and also email the output.
Both of these are very simple to implement, cover all the important parts of our wordpres setup and we hope to set them and forget them, until that fateful day comes.
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