WordPress is currently generating headlines in the online community as it is constantly increasing in its worldwide popularity and user base. A WordPress blog can be encountered everywhere in contrast to the outdated & basic html sites that are now an unusual sight; not surprisingly since we’re now in the era of web 2.0 sites. The era may have changed but the threats of the internet are still around. About ten years ago a single backup is good enough for your html website. Since html websites has no database capabilities, there’ll be no change at all with the website files anything thus a single backup is enough. But right now web 2.0 sites are all database driven meaning it is ever evolving. To put it accurately, a two week old backup of your WordPress site is already considered out of date; as a single WordPress site can gather hundreds of posts a day.
Hence, it could be great if we have a website backup solution for our WordPress website. What we need is a backup option either online or offline, and if possible something that can be scheduled for a regular backup.
The following options are available for your WordPress Backup:
Online backup approach Allows you to create online backups by availing the service from hosting providers. This involves storing your website files into an external webpage of their choice. The merit of this is that you can have a total website backup, though you might have limited access to it depending on your terms with your web host provider.
Plug-in option generally uses plug-in capability of the wordpress. The plug-ins can be scheduled and have diverse coverage, benefits and limitations.
WordPress database backup (WP-DB-Backup) is a plug-in that will enables you to copy your database for backup. It supports joomla, wordpress and various other kinds of web 2.0 sites that can be scheduled for a routine backup.
WordPress Backup (BTE) This plug-in allows you to backup your directory, themes, plug-ins and tools in a single zip file. Unfortunately the plugin still lacks in the department of creating database backups.
WP-DBManager – Lets you to do database maintenance tasks, and some other clever capability such as drop or empty tables etc. Again this works with scheduling but covers the database only.
All of the backup files coming from the plug-ins are saved as compressed archives. Being a single compressed file allows it to be easily transferred to your hard disks or pen drives for several backups.
The backup will then be sent to you online through your email account. If you are using a Gmail account then you have up to 20 megabytes of storage for each backup file. Thus a website with a larger database has to find other options to backup as the plug-in backup option is limited to 20 MB.
cPanel approach can support large backup files as well as a full website backup. A significant strength of a cPanel backup approach is that it supports full website backup in contrast to plug-ins which encompasses only specific files.
To backup via cPanel, first get FTP software such as filezilla, Ipswitch WS_FTP etc.
Next Log into your cPanel account
Open Phpadmin then go to your WordPress website files
Click on the Export Tab then choose to add/drop table
Check the option to Complete Inserts
after that click the save as file check box
Disable compression unless your database is very large
Carry on hitting the backup button
Choose whatever backup that suits your need. Whatever backup option you choose is fine It is the practice of having a backup for your websites that matters most. Believe me, possessing a fail-safe backup guarantees a great web business operation safe from any failures.
