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Backing up WordPress and your website

Since WordPress 3.0 was recently released, and I went through the process of upgrading, I thought I’d write a quick post on the steps one should take in backing up their blog, database, or even their entire website.

Keep in mind that you’ll probably want to backup your site or database more often than every WordPress update, but how often is really up to you as it depends on how busy your site is, or how often you update it.

Backing up the files on your website:

Many web hosts will provide you with a backup of your entire site, it can be a slow process to request this, but some hosts do provide an automated means of acquiring these backups, check with your hosting provider for details. Keeping your own backup is generally the fastest and most trouble free method of restoring the files on your site, should anything go wrong.

If you use an FTP client or shell (or your host has a file manager) to upload files to your site, then you should be familiar accessing those files and you can simply download your entire root directory, and then compress (.zip for instance) the folder you downloaded all the files into to save space. I normally keep all of my backups and simply burn them to disc (CD/DVD) every once in a while along with my documents on my computer, but you may delete older versions of your backup files at your discretion.

Backing up your database:

Perhaps an even more important step in backing up a blog or any database driven website is to backup that database. After all, the database is what stores all your posts and comments, if you lose your database, you lose all of your content. phpMyAdmin is a widely used piece of software by web hosts, and it makes the process of backing up your database fairly simple. You would normally access phpMyAdmin through your web hosts control panel (such as cPanel) by simply clicking on the “phpMyAdmin” link on the home page of the control panel, or by clicking the “MySQL Databases” link on the home page and then clicking the “phpMyAdmin” link from within that page.

If you have an older version of cPanel, you may only have the “MySQL Databases” link which you must click, and then find the “phpMyAdmin” link on the next page (it will most likely be text and not have the phpMyAdmin logo with it).

Accessing phpMyAdmin will be somewhat different with other website control panels, but in most cases you should be able to get to it via MySQL/DataBase or phpMyAdmin links.

Once inside phpMyAdmin, you should see something similar to this:

Your screen may look slightly different depending on your version of phpMyAdmin, but you should be able to locate a “Databases” link on the first page somewhere. You may have multiple databases listed in here, the one you want to select is your WordPress database, the one you created when you installed WordPress:

Click all of the check boxes next to your WordPress database tables, and then click the “Export” link at the top. Note that you may have a lot of tables here, depending on the number of plugins you have installed:

On the next page (the export page), you’ll have a number of options to choose from, check your options so that they end up looking like this, making sure that the list of database tables in the upper left are all selected:

You may save the database backup as “zipped” or “gzipped” or all of them if you wish, it doesn’t really matter which method choose. Once you have these settings selected, click the “Go” button at the bottom and save the file to your computer. This may take some time depending on the size of your database.

Restoring your database:

In order to restore a backed up database file, log in the phpMyAdmin and select the database you will be restoring the files on to. This process is essentially the same as selecting the database when you backed it up. If you’re restoring the database on an existing WordPress installation, you should see all the tables listed, similar to when we backed it up, otherwise you may not see any tables listed (if this is a newly created database for instance). In either case, click the “Import” link at the top:

You will then be taken to a screen which reads “File to import” at the top. Click the “Browse” button next to that and locate the database backup file on your computer, extract it from zip/gzip if you compressed it, and then click the “Go” button at the bottom. This process may take a while, so just sit back and relax until it finishes.