Blog Tip: Back Up Your Blog Regularly [via DailyBlogTips]

DailyBlogTips is a solid site for bloggers both new and experienced. DBT gives a succinct, relevant blogging tip each day – I suggest subscribing.

Today’s tip is about backing up your blog regularly. My hosting account was hacked this week and I lost two sites [not this one, obviously]. Tragic? No, not really – I’d backed up both sites via the exporting function and FTP a few weeks ago, the last time significant changes were made.

DBT is right on the money:

Creating backups of your blog is like drinking water. You know you should do it at regular intervals, but often times other activities get in the middle and you just forget about it.

The possible consequences of not backing up your blog, however, are much more serious than missing the middle-morning water glass. Should your server crash for some reason, or your websibe get hacked, you will lose valuable data.

Personally, I try to backup all my websites weekly (but I am lazy, so if you have time you can even do it daily!). Below you will find a quick checklist for backing up your blog.

1. Use an FTP client to download all the site files (the Wordpress folder)
2. Log into phpMyAdmin and select your Wordpress database
3. Click on “Export” and make sure that all the Wordpress tables are there
4. On the “Structure” section tick “Add Drop Tables,” “Add AUTO_INCREMENT,” and “Enclose table and field names with backquotes”
5. On the “Data” section leave all the boxes unticked
6. Tick “Save as file” and download the database (you can use compression if your database is big)

If you don’t have access to phpMyAdmin, you can use the Wordpress Database Backup plugin.

You’ll feel pretty awful if you’re pumping out 20,000+ words of content a month and then you lose it all. I back up about once every two weeks.