(Picture: Backups are important by godog)
How important is database backup?
Wordpress is the most popular platform for any use on internet. It is intended to be and is mostly used as a bloging platform but it’s also used as CMS, gallery software and many other. The benefits of that are good community and by that good support from other people using it. Wordpress community is so big that you can sometimes get help within a couple of minutes on Wordpress support forums. But there is also a downside of Wordpress popularity, bugs in Wordpress are well known to hackers and it’s important to make regular backups and to update Wordpress when there is a new version. If your site was attacked you can just reupload the database and files and everything will be normal again. Everything you see on your blog, posts, comments, blogroll links and almost everything else is stored in database. So it’s more important to backup your database than Wordpress files, theme and plugins.
How often to do a Wordpress database backup?
If you are making posts every two weeks and are making backups every two weeks, it will save your posts, but if something happens you will lose comments that you had within last two weeks. It’s hard to say how often you need to make backups of database it depends on how often you post and how often you are getting comments to your blog. There are plugins which are writing to database and if the data that those plugins are entering is important to you, you need to consider that when deciding how often to perform database backup. I’m doing a regular backup every tree days and sometimes even more often if there is something important.
How to backup Wordpress database?
Backups can be performed in many ways:
- using phpMyAdmin
- using Wordpress plugins
- using a script
- by remote access to database
I would not recommend last two because it is much easier to backup using phpMyAdmin or a Wordpress plugin. If you want to backup a database using phpMyAdmin, go to cPnael and find phpMyAdmin click on the database name if left sidebar and click on export tab. Now use settings like on the picture and press Go:
(Click for bigger picture)
The easiest way is using a Wordpress plugin, there is one well known for this called WP-DB-Backup. It can be used to schedule backups and to send them to your email. Just need to setup it once and forget it, it will manage all by itself. The bad thing is that it backups all tables from database you select so if you have installed a new plugin that adds some new tables to database, it will not be backed up. You need to go to plugin setup and manually check the table so that it can be backed up next time.
If McDonalds were run like a software company, one out of every hundred Big Macs would give you food poisoning, and the response would be, ‘We’re sorry, here’s a coupon for two more.
