Blog Tipz

In the past, I covered tools that help you backup your blog. You can use them to start your backup plan, but I wouldn’t rely on any single service to ensure that you never lose the contents of your blog.

There are many components to your blog, even though you probably only think about images and possibly the text that you input into your blog on a regular basis. When you look into the more advanced systems, there will be even more features and areas that have to be backed up on a regular basis.

The Best Strategy

Much like regular computer backups, your blog is running on a combination of software and computers (servers) that could fail at any time. If you trust your blog host or blog system to keep backups and remain in operation 24/7, you are making a big mistake. You want to ensure that the time you put into your blog is always with you and won’t have any chance of being deleted, no matter what happens to your computer, your server, or your blog software.

Honestly, I don’t keep enough backups, although I have automated systems in place to ensure that my blogs do get backed up on a somewhat regular basis. You should be protecting your blog from the worst case scenarios and ensuring that it can’t be permanently damaged – too much could go wrong.

• Include the following information in each backup: theme, plugins, additional files, images, and your database, at least for WordPress installations.
• Create multiple backups. Store at least two copies (preferred) at your current location, such as on one form of media (a flash drive and a regular hard drive), on your blog server (if available), and one in another location, just to be safe. The more backups you have, the lesser the chance you have of a complete failure.
• Don’t hesitate to purchase extra storage for backups. You don’t want to ever leave the chance that you won’t have a recent backup.
• Make sure you backup often and at a regular interval, such as weekly for certain files, and daily for others, depending on your update frequency.

Depending on your storage and requirements, you may want to experiment with different options and backup plans than those listed.

Backing Up Blogger

Blogger’s backup tools aren’t that great. You’ll have to export the Atom Feed, which could likely already be corrupted when you download it. There is really no way to determine this. You want all your physical content – posts and images – to remain after you export. This will serve as your backup file.

Most likely, you have your images hosted in another location. When writing posts, I like to keep a local copy stored in a archive/date-based folder, which makes it easy to reference previous content and the media that has been uploaded. Plus, it can instantly serve as a backup measure. Let’s assume that Google stopped supporting Picasa, the service used to manage Blogger uploads. You’d probably have to migrate them to another service, and you would want to have quick access to all of them to make sure they are available for your readers.

Just because you might think that backups only deal with a server hard drive failure, you are wrong. Anything could cause a failure, resulting in the need to have a clear, defined backup at your disposal.

Backing Up WordPress

WordPress (self-hosted) is fairly easy to export, at least for the amount of content that can be found within a blog. WordPress databases contain all your content – all posts, comments, and links that have ever been posted. You really don’t want to corrupt this file, or you will be out of luck.

Automattic advises that you always create a backup before you upgrade, so this is an additional “threat” that you have to look out for, which could literally destroy yout blog.

Two parts are involved in backing up your blog: the database and the files, which are both separate. You want to make sure that you have absolutely everything when you perform a full backup.

Basics on Backing Up Your Database – Use phpMyAdmin or some front-end solution for managing your database. Login to your server and then select ‘Databases.’ Click the name of the database you want to backup, then click the ‘Export’ tab at the top of the screen. Select (likely already selected) all the tables in the database. Ensure that SQL is checked.

Tick the following boxes within the SQL section: ‘Structure,’ ‘Add DROP TABLE,’ ‘Add AUTO_INCREMENT’ and ‘Enclose table and field names with backquotes.’

Within the DATA section, leave the boxes unchecked, but keep the “DATA” heading checked.

Click the “Save as file” option, leaving the template name as is. A file will then be prepared, which is a copy of your database.

More complex options are also available, but not recommended for users who may not be as aware of the structure of MySQL.

To Restore a Backup – While we’re still on the topic, if you ever need to restore a database, go back into phpMyAdmin, click on databases, selecting the database that you will be importing your data into.

Click the “Import” tab, then click the “Browse” button. Locate the backup file, select the SQL radio button, then select “Go.”

To Save Your Images, Themes, and Other Files – Within your FTP client, go to your website’s index area, where all your files are stored. Select the folder that you want to backup, then copy it to your desktop or other temporary place for download.

These steps pertain to anything that you have uploaded or imported into your blog, such as images, themes, and related content. If you make a mistake anywhere in the process, every single image that you have uploaded could become corrupted (not linking back to the original image) and you’ll again be out of luck unless you recode all the inserted images.

Conclusion

Creating a great backup plan is key, no matter what type of blog you run. Having more backups is better than one, but one is better than none. Keeping backups can be a pain at times, but when you need a backup of a database, some of your images, or other files that were corrupted or deleted, you’ll be extremely thankful.

The biggest part of backups is creating them. Hopefully I have cleared up some of the main problems that users have in the above tutorials. Backing up too much than not enough is also the better situation to be in, at least in this case.

Question: If all your images were deleted from your image hosting solution, would you have a backup available to re-upload to your server/hosting tool?

Note: Please read the specific instructions for your blog platform if not listed above.