Backing up your websites is important – I’m sure you know that – but do you actually do it? Well I do, and I thought I had a reasonable system for backing up about 20 blogs.
A friend of mine was using the same backup system after being hassled by me about not backing up his ONE site. Anyway, his hosting server went belly up recently and his site (about 2 years of blood, sweat and tears) disappeared.
No problem, because he was backing up, right? Well sort of……………
Turns out he was only backing up every couple of weeks, so two weeks of work was gone for good. Also, he was only backing up his DATABASE. All his plugins, customised theme and other blog content (pictures and videos) was also gone.
Now this wasn’t the end of the world. My friend created a new database (with a new hosting company), imported his database backup, reinstalled and reconfigured the plugins he was using and then reinstalled and recustomised his theme. The hardest part was digging up all the pictures and videos he had used from where they were scattered all over his home computer and reinserting them into 2 years worth of blog posts.
So my friend’s site is back online, but it took a fair amount of work – and I was using exactly the same backup system for my own blogs! To make matters even worse I had just finished creating another 10 sites, bringing my total number of sites to over 30! I definitely needed to change my strategy, especially since I could conceivably have to restore multiple sites if one of my shared servers went down.
So after much searching and some trial and error here is what I have come up with:
I created a Gmail account – johnnowpback [at] gmail
Why? A Gmail account gives you 7Gb of free space, and that is where all my backups are going to go.
On each of my blogs I installed the free plugin Backup Scheduler
This plugin allows you to automatically email backups as a file attachment. On each blog set it to backup everything (files and database) once a week and send the backup to the Gmail account.
It took a bit of time to install the plugin on 30 blogs, but now it is done I am fully covered. My Gmail account holds all my site backups. All I need to do is login to the account once a month and delete some old backups to ensure I don’t run out of space.
Checkout Backup Scheduler – the easiest way to get it is to go to Plugins-Add New in your WordPress admin, and search for “Backup Scheduler”. It is pretty self explanatory to setup, but if you have any questions just ask via the comments of this post.