Backing Up Your WordPress Blog – How And Why You Should Do It
Try and imagine how you would feel if one morning you logged onto your precious WordPress Blog and found it had gone. Vanished. Disappeared into the night. And all because someone had hacked into the site and bulldozed it into another universe.
It couldn’t happen? It might.
So what do you do to save your blog and everything on it? You BACK UP your blog at regular intervals so that you can re-upload ‘everything’ again, all your posts, comments, categories, tags….the works. It would be crazy not to. So how do you do it?
First off, can I give one other piece of simple advice? When I write my daily blog post I do not type it out in WordPress. I have a very simple Microsoft Word document into which all my posts are typed. I edit the post in Word and only when it’s finished and I’m happy and I have saved the document do I COPY the post text for that day, switch over to WordPress and PASTE the post into the text editor there. Done. Publish post.
So, in effect I have all my post text inside one Word document which I save, and of course make back ups of every few weeks or so. Right, that’s the extra advice, you don’t really need to do that, but it’s handy to have that back up too.
Okay, here is the information you really need. Once you are in your WordPress blog go to your DASHBOARD then click on TOOLS and click on EXPORT. It’s as simple as that.
There are 2 EXPORT alternatives. One FREE that you do yourself, the other that those wonderful people at WordPress will do for you for a lot of money.
Choose the FREE one. Make sure the ALL CONTENT button is ticked (selected). This means it will export ALL the content from your blog…everything…tags, posts, comments, categories……the lot. How cool is that?
Now simply click on EXPORT and the whole shebang will be exported and downloaded to your computer. The file is what they call an XML file. Don’t worry about that, it’s fine.
Keep this exported file safe on your system. If your blog should be attacked and it disappears (it might happen) then this is the file you IMPORT back into WordPress to get the whole thing up and running again.
It also means that you could IMPORT the whole blog into ANOTHER SEPARATE BLOG….we’ll not go there for now, just be aware that it’s possible to do it.
So, it’s easy, and it’s well worth doing. But how often should you Back Up? That’s up to you….there is no right call on this.
You may think this nightmare scenario of losing your blog will not happen, but why take a chance? You’ve invested so much time and effort into creating your blog, why risk losing it?
This is really useful info. I never even considered the possibility! I like the idea of doing posts in Word first that way at least the posts would be saved in my regular back up. thanks
The great thing about typing up your posts in Word is that when you decide to ‘make the book’ of your blog posts which a lot of people are doing these days you have it already in Word (in order and spellchecked etc) which can then either be self published in print or uploaded to the Kindle.
Think in terms of a Kindle book called something like “My Year Of Hell Trying To Be A Writer While The Builders Were In”….that sort of thing…..assuming you had the builders in of course.
Simple but effective
Simple is best.
Fantastic advice, thanks so much. Appreciated.
Glad to be of help….
Thank you so much. Really.
Thank you, I’ll give it a try.
It’s well worth it. Better safe than sorry, as they say.
Great post! I should definitely start backing up my blog, now it’s starting to grow into something I wouldn’t want to miss
Yep….I agree entirely. Once you get past a certain point in your blogging and you’ve built up comments, followers and relationships there simply isn’t any joy in someone saying to you “Never mind. You can always begin another one…”
done and simple even for a person like me. thanks
My pleasure.
Fab advice! I recently read a Blog and the writter lost all her work so I was wondering what was the best way to do this – thank you!