Posts Tagged ‘back-up’
Posted on October 20, 2008 - by Jonathan Davies
Quick Tip: Back-up Your Blog!
What if something bad happens?
What if your whole server died on you and you lost everything. All those posts, all that hard work. You’d have to start from scratch. No one wants to go through that much stress and frustration. So today I would like to plea to you that you back-up your blog!
It only takes a few minutes once a month to copy out all your posts, a copy of your theme, and uploads to your computer.
There are a couple different ways to do this. The easiest is to simply export out your posts as an XML file. Most CMS’ have a feature in them that allows you to do this. Once you have downloaded this file - keep it safe. It will hold everything. The post content, categories, tags, custom fields and the comments.
If you want to back-up your entire install of your CMS you have to go into your FTP client and select the appropriate folders. For instance, in WordPress, the “wp-content” folder holds all of that data, themes and uploads.
How often should you back-up?
It really depends on how often you blog. I would say every month for a casual blogger, but when you’re invested heavily it might be best to do it every week.
Below are some links to guides on backing up popular CMS’:
- WordPress - Lorelle covers some similar stuff to my post but also focusses on WordPress plug-ins that can do it automatically for you.
- Blogger - The Blogger help centre has a very good article on what to do for those using Blogger.
- Drupal - Drupal.org has a good tutorial on backing up the entire Drupal database.
