A few days back, I published a guest post at daily blog tips about WordPress blog backups. You can read that post here.

I thought I would follow it up with this post here, though I am a bit off-schedule and a bit too late to follow up that post.

Blogging is a phenomenon that has changed the way business is done on the internet. It started as a mode of expression of thoughts and feelings of an individual, and went on to become one of the most preferred forms of marketing. Blogging has changed its appearance since it first started and WordPress has changed the way people blog.

WordPress is one of the most preferred platforms for blogging and most of the successful bloggers prefer blogging on WordPress because of the sheer customization options that it offers them. Over the past few years, WordPress has added to its features by constantly upgrading and add to it numerous third party plugins that are either free or, paid.

And that happened….

I was super excited when I first started my blog. As I graduated from a free blog at WordPress to a self-hosted wordpress installation, I bought my own hosting plan from a not so well knows hosting company. Why a not so well known hosting company? Because my cash resources were limited and I had to manage with it.

But I was happy with the service that my hosting company provided and everything went fine for almost a year and a half until one day when I found that my blogs were not working. When the situation did not improve for more than 2 days I wrote to my hosting company to understand the reason. I felt as if my world came crashing down when I got a reply from them. Their servers were attacked by a hacker and they had lost everything that was installed on their servers. When I checked with them for a copy of my blog, I got no response. I kept writing to them but the result was the same.

My worst fears come true…

I had no backup of my blog and with every passing day my desperation grew. My blog had more than a year of content which meant almost 400 posts. Since my blog was a single author blog, it was all my own hard work. I had no clue what to do.

Finally after about 4 days I got a reply that the hosting company could not revive from the hacker attack and that they were closing down. Regarding the backup for my blog, they informed me that they were sorry for the inconvenience and that they had no backup to give me.

The most ignored aspect in Blogging

There are thousands of enhancements that we do to our blogs and there are thousands of plugins to do this. Plugins to drive targeted traffic, to optimize them for the search engines etc. But one of the most ignored aspects in all of this is creating a backup for your blogs.

Almost all servers that are compatible with WordPress installations provide an option of creating a backup for your database. Since WordPress is a blog platform that works entirely on a MySQL database, keeping a backup for your database is good enough. There are other options as well which help in creating a backup, yet most of the blogs today focus the least on creating one for their blog and prefer relying solely on their hosting companies.

Why?

It is because we have so much to do in blogging that we do not find enough time to creating backups. The thousands of courses and e-books available on the internet that claim to teach blogging focuses the least on maintaining backups for your blogs.

The easiest option for a backup

WordPress has a lot of extremely useful plugins that can do the job of creating a backup automatically for you. In addition to the two plugins that I have written about at dailyblogtips.com, the following five are a few other good plugins that I have experience with and which according to me are indeed the best are:

1. WP backup by BTE – This simple plugin takes a copy of all plugins, theme and upload directories and copies them into a directory under wp-content as a zip file.  This zip file is then sent out via email to your preferred email address.
2. WP-DB-Backup – This is a plugin developed by skippy.net and does pretty much the same thing as wordpress database backup. You can download it from http://skippy.net/wordpress-database-backup/.
3. Wp2blosxom – This plugin exports all your posts into a zip file that contains a blosxom style directory hierarchy of posts
4. DBC Backup – DBC Backup uses the wp-cron system to create daily backup of the wordpress database.
5. myEASYbackup – This is by far the best backup plugin available. This plugin creates a backup of both the code and the MySQL tables and also helps you restore the wordpress installation with a single click.

In addition to using these plugins and maintaining backups for your blogs it is also important that you ensure that you protect your WordPress installation from hackers and spammers. Constantly upgrading your WordPress installation to the latest version is one of the best ways to keep your blogs secure.