Backing Up Is What Software Is For
While we are often told to backup our dynamic blogs, it is all too easy to put off this important piece of routine maintenance because it is boring and time consuming. John H. Gohde in this post reviews two different backup plugins that offer automatic backups that are performed on schedule. Why spend your time backing up your Blog, when a plugin can do it for you automatically?
Backing Up Increases Security
The primary reason you are supposed to backup a blog regularly is to protect against being hacked. In the event, that you have discovered that your blog has been hacked. You are then in a position to quickly recover from it, provided that you have regularly made numerous backups. In addition, anything is possible. And, one day you may lose your entire blog due to a server / hosting failure problem.
These backup plugins will only backup your WordPress data databases. Thus, they will not help you to recover from problems with your WordPress blog software, plugin software, or your theme.
WordPress Database Backup Plugin
John H. Gohde checked out a very popular backup plugin called WordPress Database Backup, version 2.2.1, by Austin Matzko. Quite frankly, John was not very impressed by it. First of all, he had trouble trying to edit the options page to change the suggested email address. It took John several tries to get the changed email address to stick. And, it left John hanging when it came to the question: What happens when you need to restore your WordPress Blog? Apparently, users of this plugin are expected to utilize phpMyAdmin to restore their blog. But, not all bloggers will even have access to this program, let alone know how to use it.
One interesting feature of this plugin is that it separates the core WordPress tables from all the tables that you have been collecting over the years from plugins. It appears that there are approximately only 10 core WordPress database tables. The vast majority of your database tables are from WordPress plugins. Of course, without those plugin tables your blog will in large part stop working, depending on how dependent you are on some of your plugins.
And, it will actually work with the WP-DBManager plugin reviewed below by utilizing their backup / optimize schedule.
WP-DBManager Plugin
Next, John H. Gohde reviewed the WP-DBManager plugin [Download], version 2.31, By Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan. This plugin allows you to do just about everything: backup, restore, optimize, repair, empty/drop tables and run SQL queries.
As previously reported, John has actually successfully used this plugin to recover from a botched attempt to rename the WordPress table prefixes on his blog. Using the drop tables and restore functions, a full recovery was made possible from a backup made by the WP-DBManager plugin. Under most circumstances, recovering from a hacked blog with this plugin would only require a straight forward use of the restore function, once the security problem has been corrected by likewise uploading a fresh backup copy of your theme.
One unexpected feature of this plugin, was that it actually keep track of which plugins were installed and activated. So, even if you are starting from the point of a brand new blog, with no plugins activated. The WP-DBManager plugin will both restore your database data as well as activate all the plugins that you had activated at the point that you did the backup.
If WordPress, itself, is baulking on your restore by not finding any of your posts, then you will have to visit the Customize Permalink Structure page in the admin panels. Be sure to save your options.
The WP-DBManager plugin allows you to specify how often you want your blog backed up as well as allowing you to specify an email address. This allows you to send your backups automatically by email to an online email account, such as Google’s Gmail, that has a lot of storage capacity on it. As long as your blog is up and this plugin is activated your WordPress blog will be backed up automatically on schedule.
Restoration would require you to upload the backup compressed sql.gz file to the ../wp-content/backup-db directory on your blog with a secure file transfer utility. Further, you should always take into consideration that you will not be able to restore your blog with a plugin unless your blog is operational with access to your admin panels.
