Almost everyone has a backup scheme in place for documents and other important files on their computer. Or, if you’re like me, your intentions were to create regular backups, but you tend to not think about it until disaster strikes.
What most of us don’t think about is implementing a backup plan for our websites. Backups become even more critical when your site is built on a CMS (content management system) such as the WordPress platform.
With WordPress, your sites pages are essentially “drawn” on the fly when someone enters your URL into a browser or clicks on a link to your site. Both the page’s structure and its contents are stored in a database and are “merged” for viewing. This means there are hundreds of “reads” from the database arch time a page is drawn. And any sort of glitch could wreak havoc in the database’s structure or contents.
Without a backup, you’ll spend a good deal of time reconstructing your site; that is, if you have the knowledge to do so. If not, you’ll likely end up paying someone to rebuild it for you. Ugh!
A simple, free(!) solution exists to easily back up your site to your Dropbox account. And best of all, it creates automated, entirely hands-off, regularly scheduled backups.
Just get the WordPress plugin named “WordPress Backup to Dropbox” by Michael DeWildt, install and activate it, and finally link your Dropbox account. It’s that easy, and if your site ever crashes, it can be restored with just a few clicks. The backup would also be very useful in the event you needed (or wanted) to move your site to a different hosting provider.
Another plug-in that we encourage our clients to use is Backup & Restore Dropbox by WPAdm. The difference is that it can also create a local backup in addition to Dropbox backups.
Get either plugin, get it setup, and sleep easy tonight! It takes just a few minutes.
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