Written by Owen under plugins, websites
I got this question from a very unfortunate friend of mine, Kathy, who blogs down at Is 8 Enough?. Are you can imagine, she was pretty distraught at the prospect of starting all over again, and unfortunately, in these circumstances, backups are the life savers. Sometimes, everything goes wrong and the only option is to restore from backups. If you don’t have backups, however, you’re stuck, without a paddle. What you need is a Disaster Recovery Plan, which very simply consists of defining what CAN do wrong for your website and planning how to recover if such an eventuality *does* occur.
So, in this case, the disaster we are looking at is the case where your WordPress blog has vanished off the surface of the Web. What do I recommend to make sure you don’t end up in the same predicament? Well, I’ve already blogged in the past about how to backup WordPress, so this post is really a continuation of that. The plugin I recommended is a great one called BackUpWordPress which does an excellent job of backing up your entire WordPress installation, all your themese, plugins, settings and posts.
Now, the great thing about this plugin is that you can also schedule backups to happen at regular intervals. My DR (Disaster Recovery) Plan is simple, and I use this on sites like MBA Geek and Ugh!!’s Greymatter Honeypot. Configure the plugin to take backups once a week, and automatically email them to a dedicated GMail account. Here’s are what the settings look like:
Once all that is set up, I just forget about it. If anything ever goes wrong, I know that I have a full backup of the entire installation in my gmail account. At most, this will be 7 days old, but if your blog is particularly busy, or you think there’s more risk of losing your information, you can schedule the backup to happen daily. You get loads of space in your Gmail account, so feel free to use it up.
I hope Kathy’s experience never happens to any of you. It may not be the sort of thing that will drive you to become an alcoholic, end up in drug rehab or contemplating your life at the top of very high building, but it can be one of the most stressful events that ever happen to you .. especially if you are responsible for someone else’s websites too!
