Jun | 18 | 2007

Make Every 13th of the Month Your Blog Backup Day

Posted by Ia as Blogging Tools, Tips

Here’s a great campaign I bumped into: every 13th of the month is unofficially Blog Backup Day.

How many times have we lost important information just because we never make it a point to (regularly) backup? Blogging is no exception. If you value your blog and have spend lots of hours writing new posts, customizing the template, and promoting it to other people—which you probably do, since you’re here—you had better back up your blog as often as possible.

What I like about Blog Backup Day is how it wants you to start the habit by setting a definite schedule and frequency (every 13th of the month). Second, since it is an unofficial “day”, it has that warm, fuzzy feeling akin to a national holiday and other things people all over the world do at the same time.

Of course you can set your own schedule for backing up your blog. Of course you can backup more frequently than once every month. But won’t it be more fun if everyone backed up their blog all at the same time?

Ok, so this is a perfect gloom post for Friday the 13th, but you must realize that technology isn’t perfect. Your blog could go down and if you have no backup, then you’ll have to start from zero. All your hard work down the drain.

Source: The 13th - Blog Backup Day

Why the thirteenth? No special reason, really. But since it’s generally considered an unlucky number (especially if it falls on a Friday), it could serve as a reminder that if neglect your backup duties, something bad will happen—to your blog, perhaps?

Now that you have a backup schedule, there’s only one thing left to do: follow it!

12 Responses

Brix
18|Jun|2007

Great suggestion. Better implement that myself on my blogs.
J.T Dabbagian
18|Jun|2007

I got a question, tho. Does WP have its own blogging backup system, or should I get a third-party/force-download thru FTP?
Ia Lucero
18|Jun|2007

There’s no backup system that comes with the default installation, but there are plugins out there that can do that. But I think you should backup your whole WordPress installation via your website admin panel. Ask your host provider how to do this. I typically use the backup feature in cPanel X. FTP is also good but I don’t think you can get the backup in zipped format.
benj
18|Jun|2007

I do the backup that the WP site recommends before making upgrades. I think that’s via the phpAdmin. Fairly straight forward, methinks.
J. Angelo Racoma
18|Jun|2007

Actually, since WP 2.1 you can already export an XML of all posts, categories, users and comments. This is intended transferring to another blog, though (so settings and other things won’t be included), but can still be a good, no-frills way of backing up your content.
Ia Lucero
19|Jun|2007

Yes, the posts, categories, users, and comments (yes! the comments!) are important but what about the rest of the blog directory? I think that’s also important.
HART (1-800-HART)
25|Jun|2007

I have never tried that XML export .. although it could be good for segregating one of my blogs into a few blogs.

I recently left two ISP’s and combined into one new host for all my blogs. One was a reseller account with the cPanel, and the other was not without any of that. I can tell you that the cPanel restoration of the “full backup”s made were only about 80% successful.

This is how I backup now - keeping in mind that I have over 40 blogs ..

I still download zip files of all versions as they are released. I store them in c:\installed-programs\wordpress\versions\ - I don’t even unzip them now.

I have a main folder called c:\2007-Latest-WP and have one folder in it - \wp-content\. All the latest plugins are in the its subfolder and having it there keeps me on my toes to keep it updated. The themes, although I currently use generic themes, all of them have been modified by me in someway .. so I just started to rename them (halfway thru) to be unique to any other them folder.

Whenever I make theme changes, afterwards I always FTP that theme folder to eg. c:\2007-Latest-WP\wp-content\themes\

I have converted all of my blogs to the latest wordpress version (currently 2.2.1) using the Instant Upgrade plugin
http://www.zirona.com/software/wordpress-instant-upgrade ..
when there is notice of a new upgrade I first do a manual backup inside the blog MANAGE/BACKUP/ using the wp-db-backup plugin
http://www.ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup
then I run the InstantUpgrade.

I use the above backup and schedule DAILY backups to be emailed to one of my several gmail accounts. So far so good, although one of my gmail accounts is at 92% and I’ll have to start deleting older backups.

So - I have latest copy of wordpress .. latest copy of my themes .. daily backups .. and there shouldn’t be anything else. However, for serious things - e.g. I moved servers - that was serious - I did go the extra mile and made unique backups to be 100% sure that I had everything.

One thing I noticed about the Wp-Db-Backup plugin .. even though I had it set to email, once the MySQL database gets too big it ends up storing the daily backups on your server .. (in an unprotected area permission wise) so it’s good to clean that up once in a while.

HART
HART (1-800-HART)
25|Jun|2007

While that above post is awaiting moderation, I should also add:.. once a month backup is NOT a good plan. If you need reminders to help you backup .. try signing up with Sally Goesch’s weekly backup reminder..
http://www.fileslinger.com/
J.T Dabbagian
28|Jun|2007

I just realized something….

What if it’s Friday the 13th? Lol.
Thomas
02|Jul|2007

Actually, we started Blog Backup Day on Friday the 13th.
What’s On Your Blog’s Monthly Maintenance Schedule? : The Blog Herald
07|Sep|2007

[...] Blog Tutorials wants to make every 13th of the month your Blog Backup Day. Why the thirteenth? No special reason, really. But since it’s generally considered an unlucky number (especially if it falls on a Friday), it could serve as a reminder that if neglect your backup duties, something bad will happen—to your blog, perhaps? [...]
Blog Backup Day « zielony blogger pl
12|Dec|2007

[...] w życiu) przez mojego imiennika z BloggerDesign, a podchwycony następnie przez Blog Tutorials, polegający na ogłoszeniu 13 każdego miesiąca nieoficjalnym dniem robienia kopii zapasowych [...]

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