It’s easy to back up your blog. With a backup you can easily reconstruct your blog if anything goes wrong or jump ship to another hosting provider.
Back ups are essential in the corporate world of IT, so much time and money is put into ensuring there’s a reliable backup and disaster recovery system in place. In the world of blogging, its a rarely mentioned topic.
You should especially do back ups if you’re running a new-ish blog still on relatively cheap shared hosting. 123-reg, Bluehost, Gatorhost, whatever. You get what you pay for, and obviously if something goes wrong due to your fault or the hosting company’s, it’s doubtful they’re going to put in the time to recover your files.
Here’s a weekly back up plan for your blog that takes no more than 15 minutes to complete. Well worth it to save losing hours of hard work and leaving you looking as depressed as that mule.
1. Download your Wordpress export file
Under ‘tools’, ‘export’ in your Wordpress admin you can download your export file which will contain your posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags.
2. Download all the files in your website directory
Download yourself a free FTP program such as Filezilla, set up FTP access to your webserver and pull everything off into a folder on your laptop/PC. If you don’t already know what FTP settings to use, check on your hosting provider’s website.
Okay, so the download may take longer than the 15 minutes, but once it’s started you can go away and do something else.
