Backing Up Your Blogs

Blogging fits all, from the teenage hobbiest to big business, and the two main blogging platforms in use on the Internet today are Blogger.com and Wordpress. Both of these platforms are very user friendly and are easy to set up, but while Blogger.com is owned and backed up by Google (who says, "Don't worry, your blog will still remain on Blogger until you delete it") most Wordpress users, including numerous high-profile affiliate marketers, are hosting their blogs independently.


No one wants to find that their hard work has vanished, and Blogger.com allays its users' fears by giving them the ability to download their templates and export and download their blog entries. But what tools are at the disposal of the independent Wordpress bloggers?


First of all the Wordpress.org Plugin Directory contains quite a few tools that automate the backup and downloading (or emailing) of the mySQL database containing the blog's content -- you have your choice of backup plugins. And you can use a free ftp client, such as Filezilla, to download your Wordpress blog's templates and files to your computer. But still, it's easy to forget or procrastinate and delay downloading those files every time you make a change to your theme/template. So that's where Idrive.com comes in. Idrive not only gives individual users the ability to backup their computers' hard drives to a free 5GB online account, it also gives Wordpress bloggers a free plugin that makes daily backups to a free 2GB Idrive account.


I've found that the Idrive plugin works well for backing up all the Wordpress files but often fails to backup the mySQL database containing the blog content. That's why I use Idrive to automatically backup my Wordpress themes/templates, uploads, images and administrative files and then the WP-DB-Backup plugin available on Wordpress.org to automatically backup the actual content contained in the posts, pages, categories and archives.