Have you got an insurance policy for your Wordpress blog?

No, I’m not referring to something sold to you by some pushy insurance agent :-)

I regularly see posts on forums which sadden me, from desperate people who have lost their sites due to malicious activity such as hackers or database corruption. People rely too often on their hosting company to provide them with a restore when this occurs and in my opinion, this is a dangerous practice. You’ve put lots of work into your blog, right? So you wouldn’t want to leave your ability to restore it in case of emergency to chance would you! A bit like your reaction to the pushy insurance salesman who’s pushing those buttons, you’re thinking this won’t happen to you? You would be surprised how often this occurs and here’s an example that I recently discovered.

I recently joined a forum and upon returning several weeks later, discovered to my amazement a message on the homepage which basically said “We are sorry, our forum was hacked last week and we had no backup and the only backup that our hosting company could provide was from six months ago.” Was this a recently launched forum with little data to lose? No, this forum had existed for 5 years with tens of thousands (possibly hundreds of thousands) of posts.

It is inevitable with Wordpress’s popularity on the rise, that it will increasingly become the target for malicious activity and hackers.

Don’t risk the future of your blog with no database backup strategy. You need to back up your Wordpress blog regularly, preferably via an automated avenue to remove the risk of human error, i.e. forgetting etc.

For the less technically savvy the thought of manually backing up your MySQL database via PhpMyAdmin or another tool can be rather daunting. Well I’ve got some good news for you - there is a Wordpress plugin which does it all for you called, you guessed it, Wordpress Database Backup. and it’s very easy to use. It may lack the glamour and excitement of other Wordpress plugins but it’s extremely important, so even if it’s the only plugin you ever use, give yourself an insurance policy and download and install it.

Once you’ve installed it, select Backup from the Tools menu and you’re on your way. The plugin shows which database tables will be backed up and provides you with the option of excluding spam comments and post revisions from the backup via easy checkboxes.

You can elect to save the backup to a location on your web server, download it to your computer immediately or have it emailed to you.

This plugin also includes valuable scheduling capabilities which as shown below provides you with the ability to automatically backup your blog database anywhere from hourly to weekly! I selected the daily option, entered my email address and clicked on the Schedule Backup and one day later an email arrived with an SQL file attached containing my database backup and it doesn’t get much easier than that.

Scheduling backups using Wordpress backup plugin

Don’t put this off, visit the homepage for the Wordpress Database Backup plugin now.

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