Guide: How to Backup Your WordPress Blog to the Cloud

As a blogger, you know the hard work you put in (time and effort) to create your kick-ass blog with all those awesome content. Backing up your blog is necessary anyway and having a simple solution ready to backup your information is invaluable. If you are a WordPress user, then you certainly know the value of having backup copies of your files and database, as there is a risk of losing your data all the time.

You need reasons… Your site might get hack (due to WordPress or server security), your server might be down for longer than expected and even worse your host can suspend your blog for a silly reason (speaking from experience ~ my blog was suspended like 3 times in 3 months for getting more pageviews and I switched to the more capable server). Of course, there are many WordPress security plugins available to fortify your blog but I think one of the finest way is to backup often in order that you can re-install (or even migrate to the new server) your database/files or content and roll backed quickly if the site is exposed to such vulnerabilities.

In this post, I am going to guide/walkthrough you in backup your entire WordPress blog to the cloud step-by-step (i.e., on a couple of very reliable/popular and more importantly, free ‘cloud-based’ storage services ~ Backupify and Dropbox).

Requirements:

•    A Self-hosted WordPress blog (Mandatory! )
•    Account on either Backupify or Dropbox or both
•    Backupify WordPress plugin
•    wp Time Machine plugin
•    Some basic WordPress admin operations like installing/activating a plugin

Difficulty: Easy

1. Backup your WordPress Blog using Backupify:

Backupify is a leading ‘all-in-one’ backup provider for cloud based data which offers continuous automated backups of your online services, including WordPress (and Google Apps, Facebook, Twitter, and more). Setup takes minutes and your information is stored safely, securely, in the cloud. Sign-up for a free account to get started which comes with 2GB storage and weekly backups of up to 5 accounts.

Note: Deja vu! You might already see Backupify in action in ‘5 Best Twitter Account Backup Tools’ post. This time, we’re going to use it for WordPress.

Important note: As of now, Backupify don’t support ‘WordPress backup’ for the new accounts as they’re upgraded and redirect recently signed-up accounts to their new platform. But they indicated to provide the service soon. Refer to the ‘comments’ section for a reply from Backupify. But the old accounts can still use Backupify for the WordPress backups.

A. Log in to your Backupify account.

B. Under Settings > Service Settings > Services in Beta, Click on ‘Manage’ alongside the ‘WordPress’ option.

C. You’ll be prompted to ‘Add a WordPress Account’. To do this, you’ve to download/install Backupify WP plugin first & initialize.

D. Upload the plugin (either from your WordPress dashboard or from uploading via FTP), install, and activate it. Confirm it appears under ‘Active’ plugins.

E. Navigate to ‘Backupify’ page on your WordPress admin sidebar & click on ‘Initialize Plugin’ button.

F. Voila, now you’ll be redirected to your ‘Backupify.com’ WordPress account settings page & your blog will be added for the backups! (For example – you can see my test WordPress blog is added for scheduled backup service.)

As they stated, the first backup will be done within a few hours (may take up to 48 hours) and successive backups will be performed everyday automatically. You can check & download the WordPress backups anytime through ‘History’ & ‘Archives’ page respectively. ‘History‘ will be available upon completion of the first backup. Blogs with large volumes of data may take longer.

G. My first backup is ready. Picture for your reference…

See, this complete backup process is automatic. Once properly set, you can forget. You may download your database, content directory backups anytime you need from your Backupify dashboard > Archives > Select a service > WordPress > Select account (Your WordPress blog) and click on the file names. Backupify utilizes the popular Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure. Amazon S3 redundantly stores your objects on multiple devices across multiple facilities in an Amazon S3 Region. It’s designed to sustain concurrent device failures by quickly detecting and repairing any lost redundancy. So with Backupify no worries! Just keep on blogging your heart out.

2. Backup your WordPress Blog to Dropbox:

Dropbox needs no introduction! If you need one, it’s a web-based file hosting service that uses cloud computing to enable users to store/share files and folders with others across the Internet using file synchronization. By now, you most probably should have signed up for free ‘Dropbox’ (2GB size) online backup service. If not, you’re invited to do it first.

Beforehand, we need a plugin ‘wp Time Machine’ to backup your WordPress blog to Dropbox! It creates an archive of all your WordPress Data (database), files/uploads (everything in wp-content directory), your .htaccess file and then stores them on Dropbox (and Amazon’s S3 (not free!), or your offsite FTP host). You provide the remote account; this plugin provides a connection to the offsite facility you choose. In this post, we’re going to focus on WordPress to Dropbox backup alone.

A. Download, upload/install and activate the ‘wp Time Machine’ plugin in your WordPress blog (You know the steps!). Alternatively, under the ‘Plugins‘ menu in WordPress select ‘Add New‘ ~ Enter ‘wp Time Machine‘ into the search box ~ Choose the ‘install‘ option ~ Activate it. Check whether it’s activated or not.

B. Now, navigate to ‘wp Time Machine’ settings page. (Found under WP admin ‘Settings’). You’ll be greeted by the Dropbox credential page.

(Note: Dropbox set as default offsite service. Click on the ‘Show Plugin Options’ if you like to switch to Amazon S3 or FTP)

C. It’s time to enter your Dropbox login info here (email, password) along with the directory name (and if you are time stamping archives {can be enabled from the ‘Plugins Options’; default: disabled} that folder name will be appended with your server’s current date). Once you’re happy with the options, fire up the ‘Generate wp Time Machine archive’ button!

D. Please wait while your files & data are being archived…

E. Success! Wait for this confirmation, “Your archives have been completed.”

As you can see in the picture, it just took 7 seconds to create a complete WordPress archive (Very impressive for an empty/test blog, but you’ve to be patient if your blog is full of content).

F. Wait a minute! We’ve to check the ‘Dropbox’ now… Log in to your Dropbox account. I’m showing mine.

There you go! WordPress backup folder is appearing in Dropbox (hidden!). When navigating the folder for files…

You can see five files as the plugin promised; WP Content files (zipped), database (.sql), .htaccess file, restore/recovery instructions file and a restoration shell script (.sh) that can help automate recovery — though this is still a “work in progress.”

This plugin is simply awesome. You can use Dropbox (or Amazon’s S3/FTP account) to cloud store your WordPress blog. Do you see something missing here? It’s a manual backup process. You’ve to generate archive whenever needed/desired. However, if you’re comfortable to setup a Cron job that uses cURL, you can automate it. You may find this article helpful.

Do you know? Using wp Time Machine plugin, You can (force) backup your WordPress blog whenever you publish/update a post! This feature known as ‘Post Publish Event’ (which is disabled by default ~ for obvious reasons!) can be enabled from the ‘Plugins Options’. Nevertheless, keep in mind that using this feature will add time to publishing (depending on the size of your blog it may add several seconds, or even minutes).

Conclusion:

OK! You’ve seen how to successfully backup your WordPress blog to the cloud. Umm… Now what? Yet, you can’t rest on your laurels. Having a local (in your computer) backup might be mandatory too, incase. You can use your host’s control panel (mostly Cpanel) to backup your blog’s database or even download a complete home directory if required. There are some handy plugins available such as WP-DBManager (for database backups/operations), EZPZ One Click Backup (complete WordPress backup) to do the same. Full documentation of WordPress Backups (& restoring from Backup) is available on official WordPress Codex which has all the information you’ll ever need.

Backing up your WordPress blog is a cakewalk. If you aren’t having time to do it or automate the process or you’re too lazy, you are opening up your blog for major disasters. Whether you’re a new blogger or a pro-blogger, no excuses, please! Do yourself a favor and backup your blog (either to the cloud or locally on your computer) before catastrophe smacks so you can use more precious time writing classy content and less time sweating. I’m talking about peace of mind folks!

***Opening (title) & this closing image adopted from flickr | Creative Commons by Michael Marlatt & WordPress Logos.

Have you used any other cloud-based solutions to backup your WordPress blog? How’s the process? Is it easy or complicated? Meanwhile, I will be very happy if this comprehensive guide/walkthrough of any help to you. Let us know in the comments. It’ll be much appreciated.

P.S. Happy Valentine’s Day to Everyone!

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