I did a complete backup of this Wordpress blog yesterday. There isn’t much written, but loosing my blog entries is not something I am looking forward to! It is very important to backup your blog. I will give some reasons if you are not convinced.

First, this blog is hosted on Dreamhost. Recently many problems have been cropping up with dreamhost such as router disaster or network disaster or something like that. You never know when they will have a disk failure and it turns out that their backup tape/disk is unusable!

Secondly, Wordpress is not very secure if the recent events are any indication. The Wordpress 2.1.1 was modified by some deranged cracker. So it is quite possible that there are problems in Wordpress 2.1.2 also and if some nutcase decides to hack your site? Boom!!! - all your posts are gone..

How to backup my Wordpress blog hosted on Dreamhost?

The backup process involves two things. Backing up your blog database and backing Wordpress files which includes theme files modified by you. You must backup both.

Backing up Wordpress database - Backing up Wordpress database is very simple in Wordpress 2.1+. In earlier versions you need to install backup plugin. In Wordpress 2.1+ you can find export option under manage as shown below,

Backing up Wordpress files including customized theme files - My host is dreamhost and I will explain how the Wordpress file backup can be done very quickly. If you use Windows explorer and try to copy everything, it can even take hours! This is because the dreamhost installation contains hundreds of themes you don’t use and also transferring thousands of files over FTP is very slow.

Here is a quick backup solution. Connect to the Dreamhost shell using Putty (A secure shell client). Go to your Wordpress installation folder and type the following command.

zip -r backupall.zip *

This will create a single zip named backupall.zip which contains everything. Now this can be quickly copied to your system!

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 10th, 2007 at 10:01 pm and is filed under Howtos, Tips, Wordpress. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.