Backing up your Website: Some essential facts

Backing up your website is one of the crucial tasks that many of us forget to do. With the various automated process and too much reliability on the hosting provider, we do not pay much attention to backing up our own website data and its setting. However, you might not always be lucky enough to have your data backed up every time something uneventful happens to your website.

Also read: How to create a website?

Lets take a case, when you have posted a few articles and are editing your theme/framework. Somehow, you did some blunder and you are unable to recover your website. What is the immediate measure that you would take? Well, as obvious, you will run to your hosting provider and ask them to fix it. They would definitely help you in recovering your data. However, there is no guarantee that your latest changes are also backed up. All hosting provider have schedule back-ups which they frequently but not always. If by some chance, you do not recover your recent changes, it would be a tedious process to do all the work again and especially, when you made all your changes through your selected platform’s editor.

From this point onwards I am considering that you have the WordPress platform (as this is the most widely used platform) installed. I would refer to some of the ways in which you can back up your WordPress Database and Configurations. Although the methods that I will state will work for all the sites irrespective of the platform used.

Basically you need to backup mainly two things:

Your Database: Your articles and blogs along with the comments.

Your Configurations: It includes the framework used, your theme settings, the plugins installed, images, files and codes, etc.

1) When should you back up your website data?

You must follow the following simple rules. They may consume some of your time but they are very trusted recovery plans:

1. Back up your website database and all your configurations on a weekly basis or monthly basis depending on how frequently you update your website.
2. Whenever you are considering making some functionality changes to your website or wish to upload lot many articles at a time, do backup your database and configurations. Whenever you are working with codes in your framework or theme, do it without any doubt.
3. Backup your data when you are upgrading your platform, framework or your theme or doing any kind of up gradation.

2) What are the various ways of backing up your website data?

You can back up your website data through the following three ways:

Manual Back up:

This is the most preferred and reliable way to back up your data. Even though your back up is automated, you should have a scheduled manual back up of all your website data. This is very useful practice especially if your website is hacked or some unexpected events happened.

Automatic Back up:

There are many wordpress plugins available which automatically backs up your data at scheduled interval. BackWPup Free, wp-dbmanager and Backup buddy are some of the plugins which you can consider for backing up your data.

(Note: Backup buddy is not a free plugin)

Back up via your FTP server:

This can be done through your hosting provider server. This is also one of the easiest way to back up. You can also request your hosting provider to back up your data and provide you the folder.

If your hosting provider has cPanel, follow these simple steps to back up:

1. Click Backups
2. Click Generate/Download a Full Backup
3. Under “Backups Available for Download”, click the link with the file name of the backup.
4. It will then start to download.
5. Select a destination on your PC for where you would like to save it to.
6. Click Save