Backing Up WordPress

Your WordPress website is made up of the files that contain your theme, eg the code that supports your templates as well as the actual database that contains your data, eg posts.

In order to backup your website you will need to back both of these up. Lets start with your website files first. Contained in your files are

• WordPress Core Installation
• WordPress Plugins
• WordPress Themes
• Images and Files
• Javascripts, PHP scripts, and other code files
• Additional Files and Static Web Pages

If you are actively updating your website, you will be familiar with some of these components eg the Theme is the design template of the site that you or your web designer built or selected for you. Your images and files are what you have physically added to your site as content.

Your database on the other hand contains your posts and a lot of data generated on your site.

Your hosting provider will normally allow you to perform a full backup of your server. This will contain both your files and the database. Its normally a very simple process and if you use a host like say Hostgator, its a matter of clicking one button and the service then lets you know when its done. What it isn’t however is automatic, ie you need to manually run each subsequent backup.

Click on this Backups icon once you have located it in Cpanel and you will be taken to the Full Backups page illustrated bellow:

Another challenge with simply relying upon your host provider is the ability to retrieve and restore your backup quickly. Again depending on your host, it can take time to request a copy of your site’s backup. Its important that you know how to back up your own site files and restore them.

Copy Your Files to Your Desktop

Using FTP Clients you can copy the files to a folder on your computer (simple drag and drop). Once there, you can zip or compress them into a zip file to save space, allowing you to keep several versions.

Try and keep a couple of copies of your files so that if one gets damaged or corrupted or lost, you are not left with no way to retrieve your files. Use a combination of media such as online and local and external hard drives.

Database Backup Instructions
Back up your WordPress database regularly, and always before an upgrade or move to a new location or hosting provider.

Accessing phpMyAdmin
phpMyAdmin is probably the most popular database management system made available by most website hosting companies. You will need to know where it is and how to access it on your website host’s interface or cpanel. Each time you create a website on your server, you are also creating atleast one new database and using phpMyAdmin to do this. WordPress stores all of its information in a MySQL database and phpMyAdmin provides the interface to access that data.

While familiarity with phpMyAdmin is not necessary to back up your WordPress database, these instructions should take you step-by-step through the process of finding phpMyAdmin on your server and then you can follow the instructions below as a simple and easy backup or for more detailed instructions see Backing Up Your Database.

On the homepage of your Cpanel, click on the PhpMyAdmin icon under “Databases”.

Select the database of the blog you want to backup.

Click on Export on top of the page.

Check Add DROP TABLE/VIEW/PROCEDURE/FUNCTION, Add AUTO_INCREMENT value, Enclose table and field names with backquotes in the Structure section. Leave all the boxes unchecked in the Data section.

Check Save as file. If you want the SQL file to be zipped, select “zipped”.

Click Go to download your SQL database to your computer.

So there you have it, how to backup your WordPress files.

Images borrowed from: www.megahowto.com