Today, my imaginary friend, Mr. Cake, was yelling at me… “It’s all your fault… It’s all your fault that my site got hacked and I lost all my wordpress posts, my favorite comments from the pretty ladies on me and the links to their site! I want to die….!”
With an evil grin on my face and showing sympathy next, I replied, “Didn’t you backup your wordpress databases regularly?” Mr. Cake goes, “Huh… what’s that?” I shouted, “What the heck… must I teach you everything? I thought you were boasting how knowledgeable you are to my readers?” I got a good pinch… Ouch…
So here’s the deal, I have to teach Mr. Cake, though his old posts are all gone, he’s not giving up, on how to backup your wordpress database and why you should do it often.
Firstly, you need to know that before you install any wordpress platform to your site either via Fantastico or uploaded through a FTP program – you will need to create a MySQL database (name with password – so take note of this) and you will have to direct your wordpress installation to this database.
Why You Need To Backup this Database?
As mentioned, this wordpress database contains every posts, every comments and every link you have on your blog. If your database gets erased or corrupted or hacked through, you will stand to lose everything you have written. Especially posts that help to generate income for you. And you must know, there are many reasons why this could happen and not all are things you can control. But what you can do is backup your data. After all, it is very important. Just look at Mr. Cake… He’s a sad man now – Charming but No Support!
So How To Get Started?
First you need to know where to save the backup files to (it’s a single file). Best is to save them to multiple locations like your internal and external harddisk, your trusted partners’ computer, online backup site but encrypted with a personal password (when you are famous, you’ll get disturbed often) .
Once you are ready with your saved locations, it’s time to get cranking.
The place that you can start to save your wordpress database, take note, is the
- Famous phpMyAdmin which you can easily find in your cpanel. (due to privacy reasons, I can’t show you any screen shots)
- Once you are there, look out for the word “Databases” – click on it.
- If you have used quite a few databases, look for the one that you have used to install WordPress with and click on it.
- You will start to see a lot of words like “wp_XXX”, look up and you will see the word “Export” – click on it.
- Then look through the screen and make sure these options are ticked:
- Select all the wp_XXX to be exported (take note: if you are using some anti-spam plugins, the information can be quite huge, so you can leave this table unselected.
- Check on “Add Drop Table”
- Check on “Complete Inserts”
- Check on “Save as File”
- Lastly, make sure the option for Compression is set as “None”
Or simply look through this picture to make sure everything is normal.
So once you are done, just click Go and the file will be saved to your computer and you’re all done. All your precious posts are safe-guarded.
Remember to do this regularly. (Mr. Cake, please remember!)
