Postscript 12 Jul 2010: After writing this post I was engaged to manage the upgrade of 6 wordpress blogs. During that assignment we discovered a problem with the Bei Fen backup plugin. Basically it works the first time you do a backup but it fails on subsequent backups. You won’t know that it has failed unless you look for the relevant zipped file for downloading. If you delete the plugin and reinstall it, it works again but only the first time. Bummer!

If there’s one thing I know about data backups it’s this: most individuals or small business owners aren’t even doing one.

This article is specifically for the internet publisher who is using a third party provider to host their WordPress website.

It is a mistake to think you can rely on your website hosting service to backup your site…unless you are specifically paying for a managed backup service. ¹ Even then, my cardinal rule is never trust anyone else to backup my data.

I can tell you plenty of horror stories about failed backups. I’ve seen the most zealously cautious organization discover that their backup procedure was in some way “flawed” only to discover the problem later on when there is some disaster and an urgent need for a restore. It isn’t enough to do a backup, you also have to test the reliability of it.

When it comes to backing up a WordPress site it is a two stage process. It needs to include the database files and the directory files. There are a variety of ways to do this and you can do it all manually but this is tediously time consuming, prone to error and if you are technically challenged it can be a bit daunting. I have not yet found the perfect user-friendly method but there is a free WordPress plugin that makes it relatively easy to backup your site.

The Ben Fei plugin will backup both the WordPress database files and the directory files in a couple of clicks. It will do a complete backup stashing all the data into one zip file that you can then download to your PC for safe keeping.

The thing I don’t like about the plugin is that you have to manually cleanup leftover backup files. If you don’t do that, you’ll end up chewing up disk space in your hosting account. But it provides an easy interface to do this cleanup. It also doesn’t automatically prompt you to download the zipped backup data. ² You have to use an FTP client to do this.³ If you are not familiar with the use of an FTP client, you can also log into your hosting service cpanel to download the file that way.

You can find this plugin at this link: download Ben Fei plugin and the documentation is at Ben Fei Info.

There are other backup plugins available for WordPress but many are foiled by their geekiness or they only do half the job.⁴ The Automatic WordPress Backup Plugin sounds good at first glance. Automatically backups your whole WordPress site to the Amazon S3 service.⁵ But it only works on a Linux host and only if curl is installed and shell_exec is enabled and the upload folder has the right permissions. Blah blah blah.⁶ This might all be okay for the more technical types to handle but the average user might find all of this too daunting. Still…if you can get it setup and if it is reliable…it could be a nice set and forget solution. ⁷

Remember, you can’t be totally sure about the reliability of a backup until you’ve actually tested a restore. I’ll make that the subject of a future post.

Aside: for my young friend who has the YLOD problem on his PS3…
check this out YLOD Fix