Create a Full Backup of Your WordPress Blog the Easy Way

Posted on December 28, 2009 at 5:31 am

Over time, you can accumulate quite a bit of information on your blog. In fact, many dedicated webmasters and bloggers may have well over a thousand posts. Not only do blogs hold sentimental value to their owners, but some are worth quite a bit of money as well.

The last thing that you want to happen is to lose all of your blog’s information due to a server crash or error. Luckily, if you are using the highly popular blogging platform WordPress, backing up your blog is simpler than ever.

Start out by logging-in to your WordPress site. Click the Tools listing located on the left hand side WordPress navigation bar. Select the option that says Export from underneath the Tools submenu.

From the Export page, choose a Restrict Author option from the drop down menu. Select the all authors option if you have multiple authors that write for your blog. Select the admin option if you are the only writer on your blog. Click the Download Export File button.

This will launch a download window that will ask you if you want to open the file or save the file. Be sure to choose save the file. Choose a location to save the file to and click the Save button. This file is a backup of your posts and pages. Be sure to store it in a secure file location on your computer.

Now that you have your posts and pages saved, it is a good idea to backup your theme as well. If something were to happen to your theme, you would lose all customizations and settings that you have made to it.

Start out by opening up the FTP program that you use for your site. If you do not use an FTP program, you will need to get one. Try out FileZilla. It’s a completely free, easy to use FTP.

Login to your site using your FTP. You will need to enter your hosting username and password to gain access to your site. Understand, this is not the same username and password that you use to login to your WordPress blog. This is the username and password that you chose when you setup your hosting account.

Once logged in, navigate to the public_html folder for your site. Within the the public html folder, you should see your WordPress files. If you do not see your WordPress files, chances are you do not have WordPress installed in the root directory of your site.

\If this is the case, look for the folder that you created when you chose where to install WordPress. It may be labeled “blog” or something similar. Once you have found your WordPress files, navigate the path wp-content > themes.

Find the theme that you want to backup and drag it to your desktop. This should copy the theme to your computer. You can also right click the theme and select the download option, if you are using FileZilla.

Now that you know how to backup your WordPress blog’s pages, posts, and modified theme, you should also know how to do a recovery. Login to your WordPress site. Click the Tools listing located on the left hand side WordPress navigation bar.

Select the option that says Import from underneath the Tools submenu. Select the option to import via WordPress file. It should be the last option in the list. Click the browse button and navigate to your WordPress backup file that you previously created and click the Upload file and import button.

That’s all there is to it. WordPress will automatically import and recover your pages, posts, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags.

» Filed Under WordPress

Comments

9 Responses to “Create a Full Backup of Your WordPress Blog the Easy Way”

Jodith said on : December 28th, 2009 at 2:37 pm

I actually back up all of my word press files, not just my theme. I sometimes upload files for special purposes, and it’s easier if I have to restore my site to just upload everything rather than reinstall wordpress and then upload my themes folder.

Sallie Goetsch said on : January 5th, 2010 at 6:05 pm

This is the easy way? There are some handy backup plugins for WordPress, including a new one I haven’t tried yet, that will automatically back up your WP database (WP-DB-Backup) and your themes, plugins, and uploads folders (WordPress Backup). The new one is supposed to do both, and store the backups on Amazon S3. I hope to test it within the next week or so and write about it on the FileSlinger Backup Blog.

Melvin Ram said on : January 5th, 2010 at 7:28 pm

That’s not the easy way. The easy way is to use Automatic Wordpress Backup at

http://www.wordpressbackup.org

Pamela said on : January 6th, 2010 at 5:42 pm

Thank You for the well explained tutorial. I needed to know how to backup my wp blog and did not know exactly how to do it. thanks a million

Pamela

fotka said on : January 24th, 2010 at 12:31 pm

The best way to backup a WordPress blog is to FTP into your host and download your database and entire web directory. It’s the safest and most reliable method. You, of course, need a script to create a backup file of your database.

Tessie said on : January 27th, 2010 at 6:20 am

Thanks for a really useful guide. Even if there are plug-ins and other ways to do it, I can feel safe knowing that in the meantime my WordPress files have already been backed up to my own system.

Katie said on : March 9th, 2010 at 1:38 pm

I would seriously recommend using a WordPress backup plugin, the export function is just not that reliable. If you have a large database, it won’t work sometimes.

Also, it doesn’t backup the images, so you have to copy the entire wp-content folder instead of just the theme directory.

Darwin said on : April 30th, 2010 at 8:26 pm

excelente, gracias por la ayuda al postear este tutorial

Rudy said on : June 21st, 2010 at 9:08 am

The procedure is very well explained and very important. I just realized this because I got hacked and I lost my entire blog.

I looked in vain for a sql backup file, but didn’t have anything. I could not restore my blog. Always backup.