On November 11th McColo was turned off for hosting many spam, child porn, and malware sites (article at WashingtonPost.com). Although a small percentage, there were legitimates sites hosted there. And now they’re scrambling to rebuild their blogs, sites, and all their content somewhere else. And in thinking about the honest sites that are now down how many are trying to relocate without a good backup. So they’re in tough times right now.
But you can get those WordPress sites backing up themselves to email and backup to internet for full coverage. We worked out a simple five step process of automating your WordPress backups that anyone can use.
Automated WordPress Backup to Internet
A. First off, choose the email address you want to use to receive the initial backups. Don’t use webmail for this. Use an account that you access with Outlook, Evolution, etc. And don’t use an address hosted where your WordPress site is.
B. There is the hard way (manually with CRON) or the easy way (google and download WP-DB-Backup and WP-Cron) to automate the process. Get both plugins downloaded, unzipped, and loaded to your WordPress plugins folder and activate them in your WordPress plugin management page. A whole bunch of different plugins are included with WP-Cron. Just activate the ones called WP-Cron and WP-DB-Backup.
C. Now, with the plugins activated, click the “Manage” tab in WordPress. You’ll see a menu item called “Backup”. This is the desired one. There are some optional settings for doing manual backups. Skip that and go to the section titled “Scheduled Backup” (at the bottom). If you don’t see it, you don’t have WP-Cron enabled, so make sure it is. In the settings for this section, set the schedule to “Daily” (or whatever timeframe is appropriate for your site). Where it says “Email Backup To:” put in your email address (Step A). The final thing is the option to include non default WordPress tables. We think backing them all up is a safe choice. The default is for the plugin to backup all native WordPress tables. Click Submit after you’ve selected any other tables.
D. Now, the FailSafe part. Grab yourself a copy of OPENRSM CloudBackup. It’s a backup to internet service that’s reliable and easy. Setting it up is dead simple for Windows, MAC, and Linux systems. Make sure the selection is made to backup your email folders. Click “Daily” to set the schedule.
E. All done! Your WordPress SQL backups should be emailed to you and they’ll be using the backup to internet features of CloudBackup to make sure you don’t lose your site. Check the backup and see it churn out the backup. You can now quit worrying and let the plugins, your email account, and CloudBackup do all the work. Just make sure to delete older backups from your email occasionally and your work is done.
And if your host should crash? Fast and easy recovery is now enabled and your not worrying what will happen to you if your host goes away.
I'm eager to hear your comments...
Additional comments powered by BackType
