It doesn’t make sense to backup your WordPress blog only to store that backup file on the same website. Because if you lose that website you’re also going to lose that backup file. When it comes to backups it does pay to be paranoid, it does pay to assume that anything that can go wrong will. That way if everything does go wrong you can still get your website back. This is why as soon as you make a backup you should save it to your hard drive. But you should also save it to a remote location such as FTP, Dropbox or Amazon S3 and maybe even store it off to a DVD disc if the backup is small enough.
Just keeping your backup file on your website doesn’t make sense. As soon as you make a backup save it to your local hard drive immediately. Just in case the file gets deleted or you lose your entire website, you at least have this backup in two locations. What I do is I have a folder just for website backups and as soon as the file has been downloaded to my hard drive I name that backup file the current date and time. That way when I look at that I can see which backups I have and when the last backup was made. If I need to delete older backups to save space I’m not deleting too little or too much.
On your hard drive create a backup folder and name your backup files the current date. If you happen to have an external hard drive, even better. That way you can use this on multiple computers. But hard drives tend to fail and that’s why if you have some other place you can store that backup file offsite, that’s even better. What I’m talking about is some kind of a remote FTP service or other website. What’s even easier is if you have a Dropbox account you can simply drag your folder or your file into a certain folder and it will automatically be placed up in a site called Dropbox, where you can access it from anywhere.
If you don’t have a Dropbox account you can still use Amazon S3 which is the same idea. They store your file somewhere else where you don’t have to worry about it ever getting lost. Something I do every now and then is I will burn or write my backup files to a DVD disc. Everyone seems to have a DVD writer these days and all you have to do is pop in a disc, drag the file into that CD icon and it will burn a copy of your backup file onto that disc. If you want to label it, put it in a binder, whatever, but now you can easily access your backup files and they are permanently stored and nothing can happen. That’s the only problem with having your file somewhere on a hard drive somewhere is that it might be edited. Now that it’s stored on a disc nothing can happen to it.
As soon as you take a backup of your site make sure to at least put another copy of that backup somewhere other than your website. Either on your local hard drive, remote FTP, Dropbox, S3 or DVD disc.
Use this WordPress backup plugin to keep your WordPress blog in a safe place:
http://backupcreator.com/bc/?e=joshua shoemaker
