The Small Business Backup Guide-Never Lose your Website Data
Has your WordPress site ever crashed or given you a white screen of death? It doesn’t matter how good your content, marketing, or products and services if your website crashes. I recently responded to a Tweet requesting help for a broken WordPress site. I regularly see frantic tweets from people who broke their website and who don’t have a backup. Every website needs a backup and restoration plan because eventually your site will go down. If you are prepared for this eventuality, you have little to worry about. So let’s go over how to implement a simple and effective back-up and restore plan your website so that you never lose any of your data.
Before we cover the backup plan, if you already broke your site, don’t have a backup, and need a solution right now, contact your hosting company. Most hosting companies periodically run back-ups and they should have one for your site. But many hosting companies charge to restore your site and their backups are infrequent so you would lose anything you have worked on since the date of the last backup. My hosting company does weekly backups so I could lose up to a week of data.
If you have multiple sites and shared hosting this is an even bigger problem because when your hosting company restores your site, you will need to tell them to restore only the database that corresponds with the website that is down. Otherwise your hosting company will restore all your databases on your shared hosting account. If the backup they have of your database is 7 days old, this will cause any changes to all of your websites over the past week to be lost.
There are several different types of website backups so you will need to know the differences so you know what type of backup to have available:
- Full backups create an archive of all the files and configurations on your website. You can only use this to move your account to another server, or to keep a local copy of your files. You cannot restore full backups through your cPanel interface.
- Database Backup-Used to restore your website from you cPanel. Read the details instructions below.
- Posts, Pages, and other content-You can manually export all of your content from your WordPress Dashboard/Tools/Export. While you can export all of you content, your theme and settings are not contained in the export.
You need to always have a fresh database backup of your website available so can have your site back up and running in just minutes. The only way to ensure you have always have a current backup is the set up automatic updates. The easiest way to accomplish this is to install the DB Backup plugin. The plugin will install the backup menu in your WordPress Dashboard/Tools. Configure it to backup your entire main database and set it up to email you the file automatically.
When disaster does strike, you can restore your website from your hosting provider’s cPanel. Go to Backup icon in you cPanel and upload you database file.
From the cPanel of your hosting account, click on the Backup icon.
After you upload your database backup, your website will be back up in less than a minute.
Ok. Thanks so much. I do wish WordPress had something like Akeeba for joomla which allows you to create an full archive for restore. (it is brilliantly easy for the non-tech geek). But knowing this is very helpful.
Backing up and restoring is far more complicated than most people realize. I sleep well every night because I have two brilliant programmers who set up the backup systems for my blogs. We have had to restore a blog when the hosting company’s server hard drive failed. Much was missing when they restored it and when I asked the hosting company to restore one site – just as you warned – they restored OTHER blogs that were not affected (which deleted the posts that had been published since their backup).We decided it was safer to just let Derek manually restore those posts from the backups he gets emailed daily than try again with the hosting company. They are good, but they don’t know your content. For as long as I’ve been in computers (since 1977) I’ve wished that you could backup an entire PC (or AS400 or Web site) and just restore it all. LOL. Not happening. You have to load the Operating System, then the programs, then the data – and then reconfigure everything. You would think by now someone could make this simple! One dumb question. Since you can move an entire site with a full backup, does anyone know why you can’t just restore a full backup? Wouldn’t that be easier (she, who is fortunate to have WordPress gurus to do that stuff for her, asks).
Hi Gail,
Web hosts prevent people from restoring a website from a full backup in the cPanel as a security precaution. It prevents hackers from maliciously “restoring” a website with purposely with hacked content. Your web host can restore your website from a full backup but you would have to let them do it for you.
Zach
I run an automated website backup service called Backup Machine. It backups up your website every day and allows you to restore to any point in history. It might prove useful for some of your readers. Good post! Thanks for spreading the importance of backing up your website.
Hi Andi,
Daily backups are critical for any website. And for those who want a full, automated website backup and for non-WordPress sites your service sounds like a good solutions. Thanks for your comment.
Zach
Hey There Zachary,
I take your point, Hello everybody- i have some important business messages to be backed up onto my pc to avoid accidental loss as they pertain to certain business commitment communication. Would be very much oblilged if someone guides me on the same
Cheers
G’Day! Zachary,
Thanks for the above, Data protection is a completely indispensable piece of a successful desktop computer involved enterprise. It is very important to retain important knowledge secured in order to have piece of intellect. Backing up knowledge and obtaining dedicated pcs running just to retailer knowledge are ideal solutions to manage info security.
Great Job!
Is this back up only applicable to wordpress sites?…How about sites created in blogspot or blogger?..I’m very new at this…Hope you can fill me in…thanks..
This specific post is only applicable only to WordPress self hosted sites. You would have to review the procedures Blogger or Blogspot as each third party blog site is different. Ultimately, you don’t have control of your content. If control of your content is important, I recommend you move to a self-hosted WordPress site for your blog or small business website.