WordPress Backups: Protect your Website from Data Loss and Disasters

Is it really important to maintain a regular backup for your WordPress website? In our previous article, we discussed the reasons why optimizing the security of your important data should be on top of your priority. Today, we are going to share with you the significance of keeping backup copies for your websites.

Did you know that the cyber security market is poised to grow at an astounding 9.8% annual growth rate from $106.32 billion in 2015 to $170.21 in 2020 based from the report gathered by Markets and Markets? One of the essential segments that contributed to the growth of this market is data loss protection and recovery.

By using solutions like remote data storage centers, backup plugins and data recovery management software, you can safeguard your site against potential disasters and privacy breach due to cyber hacking and data losses.

When done right, a WordPress backup can restore your entire website to its previous good condition. It is designed to protect you not only from security-related issues, but maybe even from hardware breakdown.

So in today’s article, we are going to discuss the things you need to back up and how to do WordPress backups using different tools.

What You Need to Back Up

There are two core things that you need to backup for your WordPress website:

• Wp-content folder – it contains all the images, themes, plugins and all the files you have uploaded

• Database – it houses all your web pages, posts, users and categories.

To ensure that you have the entire copy of your website, we recommend that you do a full backup on your site’s database and wp-content folder.

How to do WordPress Backups

Manual Backup

The quickest way to have a backup copy of your WordPress files is through FTP (File Transfer Protocol). It’s very important to save all the folders and files in the same directory WordPress is installed on. Follow this simple instruction on how to use FTP.

Just like any other database, the WordPress database can be backed up just the same. Here is a tutorial on how to do a MySQL database backup.

If you have several MySQL databases and you want to know which one your website is running on, just open the wp-config.php file inside the WordPress root folder and the database name should be there right next to the DB_NAME option.

cPanel Backup

Follow these steps to backup your WordPress site using cPanel.

• Login to your web host’s control panel account (e.g. cPanel).

• Go to File Manager and choose either the Home Directory or Web Root (public_html/www). If you’re using a different control panel such as Plesk or vDeck, just locate the File Manager and follow the similar process below.

• Find the WordPress directory that you want create a backup of.

• Since you can’t download the WordPress folder (the Download button is grayed out), you need to compress it first before downloading. Click on the WordPress folder, then right click and choose the Compress option. Alternatively, you can click on the Compress button on the top Menu bar.

• For Compression Type, you have these options to choose from: Zip archive, Tar archive, Gziped Tar Archive Bzip2ed Tar Archive. We recommend choosing the Zip archive.

• Click the Compress File button and wait for the system to process and save a compressed copy of your WordPress folder. You can find it by sorting the Last Modified column to the current date. The compressed file should be the first entry to show up.

• Click on the compressed file and either right click “Download” or click on the Download button on the Menu bar.

• After the compressed file has been downloaded, save the backup copy to your desktop folder, cloud storage drives like Dropbox or Google Drive or any other backup device you have. You are recommended to save at least 3 copies on different backup platforms to ensure that you don’t lose all your website files should one of the copies of your WordPress backups fail on you.

• Repeat this process regularly.

Backup Service for WordPress sites

Another great option to backup your site is through a specialized backup service provider such as Jet Backup Manager. It works by processing a simultaneous local and remote backup of your website. It transmits the data from your WordPress file to their servers, taking off the burden from having to manually saving the backups yourself.

In this way, you can store your archived files in an entirely separate location. If anything worse can happen to your local drives, you can easily recover your WordPress installation with no worries.

We’re excited to inform you that Vodien now offers free Jet Backup when you sign up with any of their managed hosting plans. There’s a link below this article on how to get in touch with their web hosting specialist for you to get started.

Backup Plugins

There are a handful of backup plugins on WordPress that will make you spoilt for choice.  BackWPup leads the pack with more than 500,00 downloads. It allows you to schedule complete WordPress backups and automatically save them on external backup service like Dropbox, S3, FTP and others.

Built-in Backup from your Web Host

Nowadays, you will find that most web hosts offer scheduled backup service together with their user’s web hosting plan. Confirm with your web host if they do offer one and how it works.

Depending on the type of web hosting package you have, your host may either provide you with Data Backup or Disaster Recovery Backup option bundled with your plan. Always talk to your web host about this.

It’s All About Having Peace of Mind

Having solid backup strategy for your WordPress is the key to maintaining the security and continuity of your WordPress site. Keep in mind, that disasters and human errors may happen at anytime so it’s best to be prepared for it by having strong WordPress backups in place. This eliminates you from the possible stress and income loss if anything worse should happen.

Now that we have briefly discussed the different methods that you can use to backup your WordPress site, we’d like to know if you have any backup methods that work for you. What type of backup strategy are you using now for your website? Share them in the comments below.