You put a lot of work into your site. You want to optimize your WordPress database or update something big (like a very old site to the new version of WordPress) but you haven’t backed it up yet and can’t bring yourself to upgrade until you do. This is not somewhere to take shortcuts.
Or maybe it’s a new site or you’ve never backed up your website’s files and/or database, and your mind is screaming at you for fear of loss, and you’ve decided it’s time to do something about it. So here we are…
Now there’s plenty of plugins for WordPress that will do backups for you, so you’re kind of spoiled for choice. But I happened across a really cool one called XCloner Backup and Restore.
It does everything a premium backup plugin would do for free and has all the config options already set up in the right place for basic users, as well as all the advances stuff available. You can optionally FTP your backup to another server or even email it to yourself (not that recommended but you can.) Very handy if you ever want to change hosts or restore your entire site too as there’s a way to run it from outside WordPress.
So install XCloner – the only tricky bit it doesn’t do for you manually is to create a temporary working subdirectory of /administrator/backups/ in your sites root directory. So you can quickly do that through your Cpanel file manager or FTP program.
Apart from that, you just need to tell it which directory you want to put your backup in (you may want to password protect this directory from your cpanel), check any other config options, and change your XCloner admin password. Click on Generate Backup, you can include everything or exclude certain tables or directories from your backup. Sweet.
After you’ve downloaded that (and don’t forget it may be pretty big if you included all your files!) you will want to set up a Cron job to do backups regularly. Now that your files are backed you might want to change to database backup only and send via email, and do the file backups yourself every month. Or if you’re serious about not losing anything get another server you can FTP your entire site to (and DO make it another server entirely, what if you server crashes?!)
To set up the Cron, click on Adminstration-Cron in XCloner to get the cron job execution line, then go to your Cron Jobs in your Cpanel and add the line and specify how often you want the autobackup to take place (once a day or once a week maybe?) What a convenient and well made plugin and a load off my mind (and no I’m not getting any money to say that.)
Then you are free to optimize or otherwise screw with your tables as much as you like since you can always get it back if you need to. All this came about because I wanted to run WP Optimize on my sites to get rid of all the spam comments and old post revisions taking up space and slowing sites down for no reason. Also I wanted to update to the new WordPress version version on some old sites and since I had quite a few different versions running I didn’t want to risk losing any information in from my WordPress database.
And if you’re doing that, updating your plugins and making sure everything is still working fine and dandy, do another full site backup so if anything goes to the wall later you have your first clean backup too. After doing this repeatedly to get all my sites up to date I thought I’d write it down for everyone else too. Enjoy!
