Like most folk I back up my PC data pretty regularly. Cue usual joke of ‘you do back up, don’t you?’. One thing I hadn’t been doing is backing up this site. Using a couple of plugins this is easily addressed.
Download WP-DB Backup and WP-Cron and install as per instructions included with the files. The backup plugin allows you to backup the wordpress mysql tables (and any others of your choosing) to local or remote file or to an e-mail address. The cron plugin (cron is a Unix command for scheduling jobs) allows you to schedule your backups.
So I’ve made good use of my Google Mail account and now a backup of my wordpress database tables are sent to my account daily at midnight. Arguably overkill but better safe than sorry.
I’ve tried the backup files and they work a treat – this tutorial is an excellent guide for non sql folks. It amazes me how many people take backups but never actually test whether their backup solution works until they actually need it. Risky.
As for the files on the domain I have them sitting locally and do not remote edit them so they should be covered by my local backups. I can sleep safe at night knowing that:
a) This drivel can be recovered again
b) At some point this posting will come back to haunt me