How To Back Up Your Blog

If you are anything like me then you love your blog, it is your own little space on the internet and you spend your days making it look just so. It is filled with memories of days out and moments captured between your children. You pour your heart and soul into every post and hope that others will enjoy reading it as much as you enjoy creating it.

So what if someone took it all away? Your host could have a server failure or worse still someone could hack your account. What if one day you go to do something and everything you have ever written had disappeared? Every single photo lost forever. I would cry, wouldn’t you?

I cannot stress enough how important it is to back up your blog! Such a simple act can prevent you ever having to go through the hassle of starting again. Some people have hosts that will back it up for them, I have heard tales of this not working and bloggers are still left with nothing. You should be backing it up yourself, it isn’t difficult at all as I will explain below.

What are your options?

If you are on WordPress then there are several plugins available to you, set them to do it weekly as a minimum. They will all save your database, which holds all your posts, photos and comments etc..

• Updraft Plus- this plugin automatically backs up your blog as often as you tell it to. Most people seem to prefer this one although for some reason it never wants to work for me.
• WP 2 DB- this plugin will make a backup and send it to your Dropbox account if you have one. The only problem here is that once your blog gets bigger you will have to pay for a bigger Dropbox account.
• WP-DB Backup- this is the one I use, it simply backs up your database and emails the file to you.

If you are on Blogger then unfortunately you will have to do this manually. Set a reminder on your phone for each Monday and make sure you stick to it.

1. Click on ‘Template’ and you will see ‘backup/restore’ in the top right hand corner. Follow the instructions to backup your database.
2. Go to ‘Settings’ and ‘Other’ and ‘Export Blog’
3. Doing steps 1 & 2 each week will ensure you are covered in the event of anything going wrong.

What are you waiting for? Do it now!