Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Back-up Your Blog: Wordpress Edition

A few weeks ago, I shared with you a step-by-step tutorial to back-up your Blogger blog to ensure you don't lose all that hard work.  Today, I am excited to introduce Rebecca from Love at First Book as she shares with us the details for backing up your Wordpress blogs.  Please give her a warm welcome and soak up her wisdom!

-------------------------------

Backing up your blog on a monthly basis is soooo important! You spend so much time creating each blog post – and what if one day they were all gone??? Backing up your blog prevents that potential disaster from being an issue.

Tif from Tif Talks Books and I (aka Rebecca from Love at First Book) were chatting about backing up our blogs recently. She’s a Blogger gal and I’m a WordPress user so the backup process is a little different. 

Blogger user? Check out Tif’s post about backing up your blog.

WordPress user? Stay right here! I’ll walk you through the backup process.

Step 1: Go to your Dashboard.


Step 2: Highlight Tools and scroll down to click on “Export.”


Step 3: It should automatically be on “All Content” but if not, make sure you click on “All Content.”  Then click on “Download Export File.” 


Step 4: Mine automatically downloads to my Download folder, but I don’t want to keep it there, because I always want to know where my backups are.  Create a new folder for Backups (mine is in my “Blog” folder in my Documents). 


Step 5: Move the file there.  I keep my last 3 backups and delete the older ones.


Step 6: Use a reminder and back up your blog monthly. 

I’m a paper person, so my backup is written in my planner on the first Monday of each month (which you can see below, with another note to myself for that day). 


You can also set a monthly alarm on your phone, add it to your Google or Outlook calendar, whatever works for you. But set a reminder so that you can make sure to follow this step monthly and protect both yourself and your blog.

Do you backup your blog on a regular basis? What’s your system for remembering? 

Thanks for reading,

Rebecca @ Love at First Book

21 comments :

  1. This is really useful. Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you for this tutorial! I just backed up my blog for the first time and have set up a calendar item to remind me to keep it up. :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks for the useful post! I had no idea I could back up my blog even though I'm not self hosted, but it turns out I can and therefore should :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes! This is something that .com and .org WP'ers can do! Some bloggers' hosting platforms back it up also, but this way you have it on your own computer.

      Delete
  4. thanks. I was doing it only once a year as a bloggiesta project. did not realize it was that important even though I don't self host

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Emma, it's probably one of those things that you don't realize how important it is until you have an issue. Luckily, I haven't had an issue, but I'm more paranoid about the possibility. I just think of all the hours I spend on my blog. . . I'd be devastated to lose any of my posts!

      Give yourself a reminder somewhere it would work for you, so you can remember to do this in the future. :)

      Delete
  5. I don't have a reminder set up, I just kinda do it whenever I think of it... which is actually probably about once a month, or once every couple months on the outside. I also don't keep previous versions, just the most recent.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Charleen,

      Go you for being able to remember! I'm not a remembering type of person, so I must have a reminder. I also don't think you need to keep previous versions, but I do as an extra "just in case" type of thing. Even if you just keep the most recent, that works, too! It's a great backup.

      Delete
  6. Dude. I never once backed up my blog. Holy crap. Thanks for this, I'm learning ALL THE THINGS!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hopefully you just did it and have set some reminders to keep it up. If I lost my blog, I'd probably cry for like a month or so. . . so I make sure to back it up because it would just be terrrrrrrrible if I didn't!

      Delete
  7. What a great tutorial! I have automatic backup through my host but this is SO, SO important!

    ReplyDelete
  8. HUGE thanks to Rebecca for the Wordpress version of backing up your blog! This is sooooo important!!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you Tif!!! I'm glad we got to connect over blog backups! :P

      Delete
  9. Thanks for the post Rebecca! It's never really occurred to me to back up my blog (and I wouldn't have known how to anyway), but I'm excited that I can keep my content a little safer now! I make sure to back up my computer every week (which saved my life when my hard drive failed last year), and backing up my blog seems like a really important thing to do, too!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Definitely! I backup my blog monthly, and I think that's probably a good time frame for it. I also backup if I am going to make a crazy change. But yes, it's the same concept as backing up your computer.

      Delete
  10. Thanks for the great post! I never would have thought to do this myself.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Thanks, Rebecca, such thing has never occured to me!
    I will try to do it, and then keep on doing it regularly!

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.