The Easiest Way To Backup Your WordPress Blog

Something really scary happened a few weeks ago. I was trying to tweak something on the back-end of my blog, messing with some of the code, and feeling good. I clicked the update button and that’s when I saw the message that dropped my heart into my stomach. 

It was a white screen that referred to some line of code. I didn’t know what it meant. All I knew was that I could no longer access my blog. If someone typed in modernekklesia.com all they’d get was a scary-looking white screen.

Fortunately, I was able to get it fixed, but it taught me a really valuable lesson: blogs must be backed up. Let me repeat this, if you have a self-hosted WordPress blog, you need to figure out a way to back things up.

There are several ways things can go wrong:
1. There could be an issue with the server itself. Something could go wrong there and you could lose information.
2. There could be an issue that you create by trying to mess with the code.
3. Or it could be an issue you create by adding a certain plugin or upgrading something.

The truth is that things can happen, and I’ve read lots of horror stories of people that have lost everything.

So what should you do? Find a way to backup your blog.

For the past several weeks I’ve been trying to find a good solution to backup my blog. If you do a search for WordPress plugins to help you back things up, you’ll literally find dozens of them. Most of the solutions I found were a little technical, and for whatever reason, I couldn’t get them to work.

All that being said, I think there’s two really great choices for backing up your blog.

Vaultpress is great. It seems like a top-notch service. Probably the best thing out there right now. The only problem is that it costs money. At it’s basic level, it costs $15 per month. Now, if you’re a professional blogger this makes perfect sense. But if you’re doing it on the side, as a ministry, then it’s tough to justify $15 per month, especially if there are free options.

Here’s what I recommend if you want a fantastic and free service, though:

iDrive is free and works great. I discovered them last week and immediately put them to use. At it’s root, iDrive is a cloud-based backup system. It’s similar to Dropbox. And it couldn’t be easier to install.

To begin, just go to plugins section on the backend of your WordPress blog and search for “iDrive plugin for WordPress,” and click install. Once it’s installed, it will prompt you to add in your login info, or to create a new account. It will then take you to the following screen:

From this screen you can set the frequency of the backups. I have mine setup to backup daily. There’s also a button where you can click to manually begin a backup. And at the bottom there’s a restore button.

It really can’t get much easier then that. I’ve been using it now for several days and I finally feel like my stuff is covered. So get going and backup your stuff.

So what about you? Do you have a backup strategy in place? What do you use?

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