Guest Post by Funkey
Earlier today, a message arrived on my phone:
Our server failed, they (the hosting provider) gave us a new one — but when we uploaded our WordPress backup, none of our articles appeared, only the Hello World one.
After talking to the client, it turns out that although they were using FTP and the control panel at their hosting provider to backup their website, there was no actual SQL database backups being made — so when the hosting provider migrated their service to a new machine and set up a new WordPress database, that was all they had to work with, 50+ pages and hundreds of comments, gone.
The next question that was asked, was simply “how do we stop this from happening again?”
Enter WP-DBManager — a complete solution to backing up, archiving and, in the worst-case scenario, restoring your database when required.
It also has the ability to optimise your database by removing older, outdated queries, cached custom content and more — meaning your WordPress installation makes less database queries to get the information it needs, speeding up your site and further reducing the load on your hosting providers equipment.
… and the best thing, it does this all from within the WordPress admin interface — no more messing around with Control Panels, remembering database server names or any other complications.
To install the WP-DBManager plugin, click Add New from the Plugins menu within the admin, enter “DBManager” and then use the Install button. (if you search for Backup or Database, you won’t find this, which is probably why it isn’t more popular)
Once it’s installed, a new option called “Database” will appear on your admin page — the first thing you should do is click on the Backup DB option and ensure the line:
Excellent. You Are Good To Go.
appears on the page in green, which means all the necessary components required to actually backup your data are available and are accessible.
Note: Because of the huge variations in the systems used by hosting providers around the world, if any of the items appear in red, you should talk directly to your hosting provider, rather than asking us — having said this, all the hosting providers recommended by ThemeGrrl will all work correctly with this plugin.
Next, click on DB Options and check the e-mail address you are sending your backups to is correct.
In addition, you can select “Yes” next to the GZip option on this page in order to reduce the size of your database when it is e-mailed to you, as well as changing the frequency of the backups (if you do not alter your website daily, we’d recommend leaving this at once a week).
Now that you are ready to go, we’d suggest clicking on Backup DB and making a backup of your site immediately, just to test everything works correctly — if it has, you should receive an e-mail with an attachment, if it hasn’t — we’d recommend double-checking your settings, then possibly asking your hosting provider, just in case.
Backing up, as well as the ability to restore your data when something unfortunate happens is one of the essential parts of running a successful website — everyone should have a disaster strategy — WP-DBManager makes that easy with WordPress.
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