4 WordPress Plugins that Automate Backups

The WordPress Database Backup plugin will backup your WordPress database and email it to you. I recommend that you keep a Gmail account for this purpose.

How to Install

1. From your WordPress Dashboard, click on Plugins | Add New
2. Search for wp-db-backup (there’s just too many other backup plugins to week through)
3. Click on Install, then click on Activate on the next screen

Choose the Tables to Backup

1. Go to Tools | Backup
2. Choose the WordPress tables to backup
3. Select the plugin tables to back up.

The Backup Options section is for one-time backups. I do a one-time backup when I install the plugin, then rely on the scheduled backups from there on.

Choose how often you’d like the backups scheduled based on how often you update your site.

WordPress Backup by Blog Traffic Exchange (search for backup bte), backups everything else: your theme, your plugins, your media uploads, and even other directories on your website.

Enter your email address and choose the working directory for your backups. Click on the here link for some follow up instructions.

The main thing you’ll need to do is add a .htaccess file. No worries, they spell it out for you.

If you have an Amazon.com S3 account, you can use the WP S3 Backups plugin to backup everything on your site and store it in the very affordable Amazon’s “cloud.”

You’ll need your Access Key ID and Secret Access Key from your account http://aws.amazon.com.

1. Plug in the Key information
2. Choose or create an S3 “bucket” where the backup files will be stored.
3. Choose the backup frequency
4. Select what you want backed up
5. Save the changes

The premium (for payola) Backup Buddy plugin offers a bit more than the free plugins.
1. It can backup parts of your sites that other plugins cannot, like the contents of your widget areas.
2. It provides a program to help you restore your site as well.

You have to purchase the plugin and download the backupbuddy.zip file from the http://PluginBuddy.com website.

To Install
1. Click on Plugins | Add New
2. Click on Upload
3. Click on the Browse button and locate the backupbuddy.zip file.
4. Click on the Install Now button

The Create Backup screen allows you to manually create full or database-only backups. You can download and email the files from here.

You can schedule multiple backups and choose to send the backups to Amazon S3, an FTP site, or an email address.

You can also specify directories to exclude from the backup and tweak the backup details.