6 Mistakes to avoid while taking WordPress Backup – How to avoid mistakes while backing up WordPress site

These days, blogging has pretty much taken the entire world by storm and as the best blogging and website building tool, WordPress leads the league. That may sound a little far fetched  but when you actually think about it, it is not that far fetched at all. For example, bloggers have become influential members of the media, the press and everything else that makes our culture what it is today.

There are very few things on the internet that are not in one way or another connected to blogging. Blogs are essentially the undercurrent of our shared culture because most of the blogs are written by real people, normal people. Blogs are shaped by their interests and their opinions, not a corporation or anything like that- the way many people see the mainstream media as.

WordPress is by far one of the most popular blogging platforms available on the internet because it is free, it is popular and wide-read and it is very easy to use. WordPress offers free blog space to anyone who would like to blog. And if there is one thing about blogs, well depending on how often a person adds content to it, they can get very large- sometimes much larger than even the blogger first intended.

That is why it is very important to back up everything you put on WordPress  and even the entire blog site itself. It is difficult to keep a blog going, but to have it hacked or destroyed by a virus or something like that would be by far the worse case scenario. You could lose some information, or the entire site, so that is why it is important to have all the WordPess content backed up.

WordPress backup mistakes to avoid

Used by millions throughout the world, WordPress is the most preferred free blogging tool and self hosted website builder tool. But, like any place here on WordPress too, bloggers and writer commit some serious mistakes, and one of them and the most severe is not backing up the content of your WordPress. Although some may keep backup but then they also make mistakes, which nullify the endeavor to make backup of the content. Therefore below are mistakes, which must not be made while backing up WordPress.

Backing up the post only:

It is a general belief that a website or for that matter a blog has only content and most of the people make backup of only post. But one must not forget that a website has much more than just written contents. True backup means backing up all theme modification, styles and even plugins, which are being used in the website.

Banking on manual backup:

People think that saving the posts on a regular basis is the meaning of backup and thus they rely completely on manual backup. But at times manual backup can prove to be catastrophic, as it is humanly impossible to keep up with the minute and detailed advancement computers and internet is taking. So, in order to be safe and to have a foolproof backup make such procedures automatic and look for option like cloud drives.

How to backup your self-hosted WordPress website?

Automatic WordPrss Backup

There are plugins like updraftplus or backWPup, VaultPress that automatically help in taking regular backups. Otherwise from hosting panel you can keep provision of automatic backup.

Manual WordPress Backup

There are 2 parts. File backup and Database backup. Even if you take manual backup of your self hosted WordPress Site, make sure you have taken all backup of your files under public_html (especially wp-content folder) via FTP client like FileZilla or CoreFTP or from hosting cPanel ->File manager you can compress the public_html folder and download it and from your hosting cPanel you must take mySQL database back up (PHPMYAdmin->Database->Export). Save them to your local system. But this is time consuming and regularly you have to do it. So it is better to go for full automatic backup.

Not testing Backups:

It is the most common mistake, which almost everyone make at least ones. But, it is rather foolish to not check and test the backups, as you are taking the pain and even investing valuable time in backing up the data and still leaving it for odds that may be it won’t work.

Making Backup only on Hosting account:

Some hosting sites do offer daily backups of the account and similarly there are several WordPress Plugins, which allow its users to make backups on the hosting account. Till here its fine but the biggest flaw with making backup only on hosting account is that you never know when your account will get compromised and all of your data will get erased, and this is the exact reason why it is advised to have backups at least two separate places so that in case one backup is lost you still have all your data.

Not securing the backups:

Backups may contain important data and information like administrator username and password apart from other information related with the content of the website. Therefore, it is of prime importance to safeguard even the backups.  Make sure that you have not only the backup of data but they are secure too. Most people miss this security part.

Irregular frequency of backing up:

For those avid bloggers who are very active on their blogs or websites but make backups on a monthly or weekly basis, it is indeed a big mistake. You never know when a hacker will sneak into your system or on your website and cause a security threat. The only solution to this is to have a regular frequency of backing up.