How Do I Back up My Wordpress Site?
Hi everyone. Leo Notenboom here for askleo.com. Today's video is actually a move from my Ask Leo!
on Business site. It needs a bit of updating so I thought I would bring it over here and share it
with all of you. Wordpress powers something like 20 to 30 percent of the internet. In other words,
all of the sites that you visit it’s a good chance that, you know, one out of five of them
are powered by Wordpress. Certainly that's true for Ask Leo!. Ask Leo! Is a Wordpress based site.
As a result my thoughts about backing up and websites have some very specific answers when
it comes to backing up your website. If it's running in Wordpress, if you've got a business,
if you've got a personal blog, if you've got anything at all important online,
this is something that's really really important to keep in mind. I want to be clear the goal here,
of backing up your website, is once again to handle disaster. So for example if your web host
goes away (don't laugh it has happened I have had to recover for people whose web host went away
without warning) ideally you would be able to reconstruct your website within a day or two
at a different host and not have lost more than maybe a day or two worth of comments or
updates. In other words you want to have a backup copy of your website that you can restore. Now the
approach that I recommend, it's not a free one, but it is the approach that I use, and I recommend
it strongly for a couple of reasons. It's Backup Buddy. It's a Wordpress plugin and it actually
handles backing up very very well. It will back up your entire site. It gives you the option of
storing those backups automatically to a different location, your own Dropbox, your own Amazon S3,
your own Google drive, whatever. They also include their own cloud storage specifically for this
purpose called Stash. I happen to use Google drive. So what that means is that every night
my website gets backed up and the backup appears automatically in my Google drive.
That is awesome and it's for more than just backing up the website. Like I said,
when it comes time to restoring the website, well, with Backup Buddy it's a very simple operation.
You upload the backup, you run a script that the backup includes or provides, and within a little
bit of time your website is back. You've gone in and made whatever other DNS changes to point at
your new host, but the actual mechanics of putting all the files and folders and Wordpress back in
place is handled automatically by Backup Buddy. But it's also good for other things. For example
the Backup Buddy backup is really just a huge zip file of everything in your Wordpress installation,
including everything you've uploaded. So if you've uploaded a document or a picture or something else
or you don't know where that plug-in came from or whatever, you on your PC or anywhere else
can examine the contents of that zip file can extract the information that you care about.
That you know as part of your website. And do whatever you need to do with it. I’ve done this
multiple times, usually with images, usually with things that I’ve uploaded to a website and then at
least lost track of. I’m sure I have it elsewhere on my machine, because I’m so horribly backed up,
but it's sometimes just easier to go to the backup of the website and extract the individual file.
So you've got two things so far that Backup Buddy does for you. It backs up your entire website,
allows you to restore it completely, and allows you to access individual files from the backup
copy. There's one more thing that I’ve used it for as well, and honestly this feature alone
when you encounter it is one of those things that makes you do a forehead slap, because it is such
a powerful feature, and that is change your domain. Let's say someday I want to change from
askleo.com to some other domain that I own let's say that I finally decide to pack it all in and
I’m going to make it leosanswers.notenboom.org, or something right, some other domain that I own.
Backup Buddy at the time you do a restore will let you specify what the new domain should
be. Which means that once you restore to this different domain it all just works. All of the
links all of the references they all just work. It is a way to clone a website to a completely
different domain along the way. So backing up, it is something that I strongly recommend you
do. And Backup Buddy is exactly how I recommend you do it for your Wordpress site. Now there is
something in Wordpress called Export. I want to be very clear about that Export is kind of nice, and
you can export some things with it. You can back up some things with it. But it does not include
everything. The Export function is a fine way to make an additional copy of your content it's,
perhaps, a way to literally export your content to some other platform or to some other form
if you need it. However it's very important to realize what the Export function does not contain.
It does not contain Wordpress, all of your themes, all of your plugins, all of Wordpress itself are
not included in this backup. And therefore it is not a simple restore to a replacement host
or a replacement site. And the other temptation of course is to rely on your host for backing up.
The statement that I’ve made repeatedly about relying on any of your online providers is that
the backups that they put into place are normally for their protection not yours. In that worst case
scenario where the provider goes away completely not only have they taken your website down but
they've taken all their backups with them. Some do provide some level of Wordpress level backup,
and that's great when they do. But you need to ensure it is what you need that you could in fact
restore at a different host. My preference is that you take control with a plug-in like Backup Buddy
and use it to back up your site and know that you can restore it or have someone restore it
completely somewhere else. For links, for updates, for comments and more visit askleo.com/129947.
I’m Leo Notenboom this is askleo.com.