Lyte Byte

One of the important thing in all fields in this modern world is to have a backup so that everything runs smoothly incase something fails. But this is ignored by many people (including me) when it comes to backing up the contents of your files in your computer or the contents of your blog. I learnt it hard way the importance of backing up.

My Experience

Case 1:
I first started blogging in blogspot and as it was growing, I got my own domain and I got the hosting package from eBay. Within a month the hosting company disappeared and I did not have a backup.
Case 2:
I had all my documents and photos of all my college days’ vacation and excursion in my hard disk and once my friend just wanted to try what is the content in an old floppy. It had a virus and deleted a .dll file, windows stopped working, tried to restore using recovery disks, didn’t workout, created bad sectors in hard disk and hard disk crashed. I did not have a backup here either.

Backing up the blog contents: (This applies to Wordpress only)
As I did not have any backup of my content’s with me, I managed to retrieve the latest posts from my feeds in feedburner and my old posts from blogger. I managed to retrieve the files of the themes which I have modified from the temporary folder of windows. I did manage to retrieve my content with minimal damage but if only I had the backup there would have been very less work with no panic.

In Wordpress versions before 2.1, there used to be a Wordpress database backup plugin but with the introduction of 2.1 the backup features became lot simpler. Now Wordpress gives an export file in the form of xml which is called Wordpress eXtended RSS or WXR. This contains your posts, comments, custom fields, and categories.

Export: To get the export file of your blog, go to Manage -> Export.
Choose restrict author as all to get the full backup and Click ‘Download Export File’. Save the output file in your computer.

Import: To import it back into Wordpress incase of database failure or site crash,
Go to Manage -> Import, Click on the option called ‘Wordpress’. This helps to Import posts, comments, custom fields, pages, and categories from a Wordpress export file.
Browse and select the backed-up file and upload it. Your Contents are restored.

Backing up your themes and Plugins:
Using your FTP, download the themes and plugins section under content and save it in a safe place. In case of any failure you can always use this again.

Points to Ponder and Tips on backup:

1) How frequent you take a backup of your posts depends on you. If you post everyday and get lots of comments, I would suggest taking a backup at least every other day as this won’t usually take much time.

2) Your theme and plugin sections may increase in size as days go by. So what you can do is, create a backup copy first and whenever you do some change in any file from themes or plugins save it over the copy in the backup also. By this way you can reduce the bandwidth resource and reduce the workload of downloading the whole section.

3) I am assuming that you are not hosting any files or pictures; in case you are then you have to take a backup of those as well.

4) I usually have this folder structure in my computer for taking backup, you can use this as well.

5) They may give you a backup option from a Cpanel if you are using Linux server but I find this easier. In case you find that easier, go ahead.

6) Last but not the least, the golden rule of backing up is ‘Take the backup and backup the backup’. The probability of losing the backup at the same time might be less but still there is a probability. So one might have to take a backup of backups. There are lots of free file storing sites online which you can use or store it a re-writable CD or in an extra pen drive.

I will continue this series on backing up data’s in windows XP and Vista in the next post.

If you liked this post, digg it here.

Update: Next post on this series, How to backup data in Windows XP and Vista?, How to backup important mails?

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