Web fun-duh-mentals 101: Site looks good, did you back that up?
In the first edition of Web fun-duh-mentals 101 we covered registering your own domain name, properly. Some things have changed for this blog…
Hosting locally (in South Africa) is our 2nd largest business expense. Hosting a site or blog that gets a bit of traffic, like the blog you’re reading right now, costs more than the minumum wage of domestic workers.
Costed more. We do not host this blog in South Africa anymore.
Back-up, Back-up, Back-up. Please ensure that you always back your website & database up regularly. There are ISP’s who backup your data regularly so rolling back shouldn’t be a problem. For example, when you make a little mistake with your website and accidentally delete many comments.
No matter what your ISP, web developers or anyone says. Ensure you have regular backups of your site or blog.
When it comes to wordpress there is an export function available… Once logged in as admin click Manage => Export
When you click the button below WordPress will create an XML file for you to save to your computer.
This format, which we call WordPress eXtended RSS or WXR, will contain your posts, comments, custom fields, and categories.
Once you’ve saved the download file, you can use the Import function on another WordPress blog to import this blog
So now you have an XML file with all you posts, comments, pages etc.
That’s not it. Do not forget to back your data up (uploaded files & images, plugins and themes)
In wordpress this can be found in the wp-content folder. You should also backup the wp-config.php file.
This can be done via FTP or is your web hosts file manager. Save this on your local machine (/home/rafiq/backup/blog/ or My Documents) Burn it to a CD to be extra sure.
Those of you in who can are able to automate this whole process by writing a cron.