Daily backups for WordPress with Gmail
Yesterday, I switched to a new web host after my old one proved to be way too sketchy and unreliable. My new host seems to be great so far, but the experience of finding my site crashed at least once a week through no fault of mine had me thinking about backup options. I did a little research and have set up a system for backing up my blog that’s working great so far, so I thought I’d relate the details for anyone else that might be interested. Please note this applies to WordPress users.
Daily WordPress backups using Gmail
- First off, get a Gmail account. Why Gmail? Because it’s free, wicked handy and has the highest free storage rate out there that I know of. Since the point of this is to back up your blog in case your site should crash and die, you don’t want to be using any email address associated with your domain as that could also fail with the rest of your site. It’s not too hard to get a Gmail account. Find someone that has one and ask for an invite. I have something like 50 invites, so email me if you need one. I created one called davebgimp.backup for this purpose.
- Now, there’s two ways to do this, manually setting up a CRON job, which is more trouble than a lot of people want to deal with, or you can download these handy WordPress plugins, WP-DB-Backup and WP-Cron written by Scott Merrill. Thanks Scott! Download both plugins, unzip and upload them to your WordPress plugins folder and then activate them on your WP plugin management page. You’ll notice WP-Cron comes with a whole bunch of different plugins. Just activate the ones called WP-Cron and WP-DB-Backup.
- Now, with the plugins activated, click the “Manage” tab in WordPress. You’ll see a menu item called “Backup”. Click that bitch! You’ll see various settings for doing a manual backup. Skip those and go to the bottom section, titled “Scheduled Backup”. If you don’t see it, you don’t have WP-Cron enabled, so double check that. In the settings for this section, set the schedule to “Daily”. Where it says “Email backup to:”, enter that Gmail address you created. Lastly, you’ll have the option to include non-core WP SQL tables. That’s up to you. The plugin, by default, will backup all native WP tables. After you’ve decided about the tables, if in fact you have any others, hit “Submit”.
- You’re finished! Daily SQL backups should be emailed to you every day. Check the account later and view the magic! I set up a filter, telling Gmail to automatically archive any email sent to my backup address from my site, however you don’t really need to do that. You can now walk away and let it do all the work. Check the account every once in a while if you have a really large database. You might want to delete older backups as time goes on.
November 30th, 2005 at 5:51 am
[...] Daily backups for WordPress with Gmail 用GMAILæ¯å¤©å¤‡ä»½wp (tags: blog wordpress gmail tools) [...]
June 6th, 2006 at 8:44 am
[...] Daily Backups with WP-Cron, WP-DB-Backup and GMailYep, you can get WordPress to mail you a backup of your database every day with just two plugins. [...]
June 7th, 2006 at 5:46 am
Great idea! I’ll definitely try that.
Thanks.
June 7th, 2006 at 6:49 am
[...] davebgimp.com » Daily backups for WordPress with Gmail. [...]
June 7th, 2006 at 7:15 am
[...] Read: Daily backups for WordPress with Gmail [...]
June 7th, 2006 at 10:27 am
[...] Forse una delle cose che terrorizza di più i tantissimi blogger è la possibilità di perdere tutti i dati e, dunque, tutti gli articoli fino a adesso scritti. Davebgimp per venire incontro a questo problema ha pubblicato sul suo blog un tutorial (in inglese) che spiega come utilizzare gmail (che, come tutti sanno, offre tantissimo spazio) per fare un Backup giornaliero dei dati del nostro blog (che, però, deve essere basato su Wordpress). [...]
June 7th, 2006 at 2:10 pm
[...] Per tutti coloro che hanno un blog basato su  WordPress, davebgimp ha scritto un tutorial per fare il backup giornaliero del nostro wordpress blog sul nostro account Gmail che come sappiamo ci da un sacco di spazio per conservare le nostre missive digitali. Molto Utile!!! Posted by Spina Rosario | [...]
June 7th, 2006 at 9:59 pm
[...] 1. Daily Backups with WP-Cron, WP-DB-Backup and GMail You can get WordPress to mail you a backup of your database every day with just two plugins. 2. WP Codex: Backing Up Your Database This is more of a general tutorial on backing up your WP database, but there is a short reference to WP-Cron and scheduling daily backups somewhere down there. [...]
June 8th, 2006 at 2:38 am
Thanks daveb,
excellent idea!
June 8th, 2006 at 3:26 am
[...] blog tramite Gmail No Comments so far Leave a comment RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI Leave a comment Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTMLallowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong> [...]
June 8th, 2006 at 7:23 pm
[...] Daily backups for WordPress with Gmail (tags: web blog wordpress backup) [...]
June 9th, 2006 at 2:27 pm
Thanks for the great tip. I’ve been using the WP-DB-Backup plugin for sometime and saving the backups manually but the WP-Cron is a godsend for automating it.
Thanks again for the walk through and tip! :)
June 10th, 2006 at 12:35 am
I\’ve been using this type of mailed backup for abouat 6 month, but there is a realy big problem with gmail : The backup file dosen\’t display as an atachement , instead when I open a mail backup i see plain text : his is a multi-part message in MIME format.
…. how do I fix this
June 11th, 2006 at 5:04 am
[...] If you use WordPress do you know how to back up your database? I’ve had a few server-side hiccups lately and the only thing that stopped me from having a bigger heart attack than I did was the knowledge I had a backup that was only a few days old. I use the plugin method as it requires the least amount of fussing with the back-end of things. If I was feeling even cleverer, I would set up automatic daily backups then I’d never have to worry again. [...]
June 12th, 2006 at 5:52 am
[...] Daily backups for WordPress with Gmail Un pratico tutorial per effettuare un backup di wordpress sfruttando lo spazio gmail [...]
July 10th, 2006 at 11:03 pm
[...] vai al tutorial [english] [...]
July 10th, 2006 at 11:35 pm
[...] vai al tutorial [english] [...]
July 14th, 2006 at 4:42 am
[...] Christoph Hörl PermalinkWordpress [...]
July 20th, 2006 at 11:18 am
This is brilliant! Thanks for the tutorial. I am going to set a monthly appt. in GCal to remind me to clear out older backups. Love the G!
August 2nd, 2006 at 11:09 am
[...] After a recent website hacking experience, and a near HDD crash, I have become more receptive to backup solutions. I have started to utilize Carbonite for my HDD backup as they offer seamless background backups at a great value ($5 a month for unlimited storage). Thus far they are highly recommended. To backup my website database I have turned to a simple Wordpress plugin solution that emails me daily my database file to gmail. Simple and transparent. Check out an explanation here on how to set it — and forget it. [...]
August 11th, 2006 at 6:21 pm
[...] Have a look at davebgimp.com » Blog Archive » Daily backups for WordPress with Gmail Daily WordPress backups using Gmail [...]
September 23rd, 2006 at 2:24 pm
[...] In addition to thanking Thilak, I’d also like to thank Dave’s tutorial on how to do this. « Hacking eBay: Automatically Watch Items [...]
January 3rd, 2007 at 11:27 am
[...] davebgimp.com » Blog Archive » Daily backups for WordPress with Gmail Utiliser gmail pour sauvegarder sa base de données wordpress. (tags: technosphère wordpress gmail) [...]
February 21st, 2007 at 7:22 pm
Heh who would of thought, i’ve just set this up and it works perfectly! Also Gmail is now open to the public, so our invites are redundant!
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