Yesterday I discussed backing up your hard drive  and also told you about this hosting service which I am using these days which offers me Autopilot maintainance on my PBN, so today I thought it would be good to talk about backing up your WordPress database.

Yes, I know, your webhost has daily backups but do you only want to rely on that? Read Scam’s comment on yesterday’s post. His host was backing up a corrupt version of his database. And a webhost that I used to use had some backup problems and I lost a couple days worth of data for another site.

Just a few months ago I began availing the PBN hosting services and  I started using the WordPress plugin, WordPress Database Backup (tricky name, huh?). I use the scheduled backup by email option and have it sent to my gmail account. I then use a filter in gmail to have the backup sent to trash. Gmail stores 30 days worth of messages in the trash so I will always have the last 30 days of backups. I don’t completely trust the plugin so I do check the trash two or three times a week to make sure the backups are there – I have this set as a recurring task in my calendar. Since I have three separate WordPress installations, three database backup files are being created and filtered to the email trash daily.

The website for the plugin contains the installation and configuration instructions, which are straightforward.

What I have not yet figured out is how to automate a backup of the rest of the files associated with my site; the templates, plugins, images, etc… If anyone has an automated system for doing this I would love to hear about it.