Table of contents for Backup and Recovery

1. Backup and Recovery: An Introduction
2. Backup and Recovery: Backing Up Your File Base
3. Backup and Recovery: Backing Up Your Database
4. Backup and Recovery: Backup Plugins
5. Backup and Recovery: Restoring Your Database
6. Backup and Recovery: Restoring Your File Base

In the final training post of this tutorial I would like to take you through recovering the database archive you created in Backup and Recovery: Backing Up Your Database.

I will discuss the times when you should consider a database restore, what tools to use for the restore and lastly a video showing how to do that restore.

When to Restore Your Database

The times when you recover your database will be very similar to restoring your file base namely

• Migrating your blog
• Hardware or system failure causing data corruption
• Roll back a failed update of WordPress
• Recovering from a hacking attack
• User error – you accidentally deleted yourdatabase for example
• As part of a test of your backup

The only difference is that you must spot where the error lies, if you have corrupt posts, restore the database, if you cannot find theme files restore the file base.

Stop Before You Do Anything Else

Backup the database as it is now.  This gives you a stable poitn to return to if you cause issues with your recovery.  You know it cannot get anyworse than it already is.

If you can, collect metrics, how many posts, comments, tags and categories do you have,  this can be obtained from the dashboard of your blog.  This will be used to help you test that recovery has worked correctly.

How To Restore Your Database

In our backup process we created a SQL archive file.  The contents will look something like this

–
– Database: `wpowners`
–

– ——————————————————–

–
– Table structure for table `wp_wpoc_comments`
–

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `wp_wpoc_comments` (
`comment_ID` bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
`comment_post_ID` bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL default ’0′,
`comment_author` tinytext NOT NULL,
`comment_author_email` varchar(100) NOT NULL default ”,
`comment_author_url` varchar(200) NOT NULL default ”,
`comment_author_IP` varchar(100) NOT NULL default ”,
`comment_date` datetime NOT NULL default ’0000-00-00 00:00:00′,
`comment_date_gmt` datetime NOT NULL default ’0000-00-00 00:00:00′,
`comment_content` text NOT NULL,
`comment_karma` int(11) NOT NULL default ’0′,
`comment_approved` varchar(20) NOT NULL default ’1′,
`comment_agent` varchar(255) NOT NULL default ”,
`comment_type` varchar(20) NOT NULL default ”,
`comment_parent` bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL default ’0′,
`user_id` bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL default ’0′,
PRIMARY KEY  (`comment_ID`),
KEY `comment_approved` (`comment_approved`),
KEY `comment_post_ID` (`comment_post_ID`),
KEY `comment_approved_date_gmt` (`comment_approved`,`comment_date_gmt`),
KEY `comment_date_gmt` (`comment_date_gmt`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM  DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 AUTO_INCREMENT=2 ;

–
– Dumping data for table `wp_wpoc_comments`
–

INSERT INTO `wp_wpoc_comments` (`comment_ID`, `comment_post_ID`, `comment_author`, `comment_author_email`, `comment_author_url`, `comment_author_IP`, `comment_date`, `comment_date_gmt`, `comment_content`, `comment_karma`, `comment_approved`, `comment_agent`, `comment_type`, `comment_parent`, `user_id`) VALUES
(1, 1, ‘Mr WordPress’, ”, ‘http://wordpress.org/’, ”, ’2009-09-29 04:26:45′, ’2009-09-29 11:26:45′, ‘Hi, this is a comment.<br />To delete a comment, just log in and view the post&#039;s comments. There you will have the option to edit or delete them.’, 0, ’1′, ”, ”, 0, 0);

….AND MANY MORE

This extract from my archive files show the comamnds which will recover my comments table.  First the file recreates the tables, then it runs a series of insert commands which will add the data back into that recreated table.

It may not seem very technical, but essentiually, the recovery process is a series of reacreating tables and the placing the data back into the tables one row at a time.

PhPMYAdmin Restore

We used phpmyadmin to build the archive file and we are going to use it again to restore the data.  Load up phpmyadmin acording to the instructions supplied by your hosting company.

Navigate to your database and select the import function.  Browse to your saved archive file and click on go, your import and recovery will now begin.

How Long Will The Recovery Take

That all depends upon how big your blog is.  In the video acompanying this post, it takes less than a minute,  but a production blog with hundrerd of posts and many plugins will take far longer.

PANIC POINT!

When doing the recovery, your system will go off and appear to do nothing, you will panic that your recovery is not working, this is okay, I recommend that you practise your recovery so that you know how long it takes so you will not panic during a real recovery scenario.

Upon completion of the process phpmyadmin will return a status update of how may tables and records were recovered, this is when you know that the process is completed.

Keeping Your File Base and Database In Line

If you have restored your database to a point before a WordPress update you will need to run the update process again.  This can be done by running the following script

http://{YOUR DOMAIN}/wp-admin/upgrade.php

Testing the Recovery

Using the metrics we collected earlier, you should log into your site and ensure you have recovered the correct number of posts, comments etc.

VIDEO: Recovering the WordPress Database

Running time for this video is approximately 3 minutes.

View the video>>

Discuss this Post

If you would like to discuss this topic, please  leave a comment

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

Backup and Recovery: Restoring Your Database

Table of contents for Backup and Recovery

1. Backup and Recovery: An Introduction
2. Backup and Recovery: Backing Up Your File Base
3. Backup and Recovery: Backing Up Your Database
4. Backup and Recovery: Backup Plugins
5. Backup and Recovery: Restoring Your Database
6. Backup and Recovery: Restoring Your File Base

In this tutorial I would like to take you through the process of recovering the file base archive we created in the tutorial Backup and Recovery: Restoring Your File Base.  I will look at when to recover, how to do that recovery and show you the process in the associated video screen cast.

When To Recover

Here are some of the scenarios you will encounter which may require a backup recovery.  It’s my guess you will know when to recover, you will not be able to access your blog or the backend, that’s when to begin.

• Migrating your blog
• Hardware failure causing file corruption
• Roll back a failed update of WordPress
• Hacking attack
• User error – you accidentally deleted your file base for example
• As part of a test of your backup

Don’t Panic

When you are in a recovery scenario, the most important thing is not to panic, you need to slowly and methodically recover the file base and database, this tutorial is equipping you with the knowledge to do that process.  At the end of this series there are some exercises to test this knowledge so you do not enter a recovery situation cold without prior experience of the process.

Counter Intuitive Moment

Make a backup of your problematic file base, before you start the recovery.  This give you a position to fall back to if your recovery process causes more problems.  It will not get any worse than it is now thinking.

Keeping the Database and File base In Line

Just a quick point to say you need to keep your filebase version and your database version in line.  For example if you have just updated your version of WP it is very likely that the database has been updated too, please recover the database before recovering the file base to keep the two systems in line, you can have issues if you are using an updated database and an old file base.

How To Recover Your File Base

Recovering your file base is the reverse operation to backing it up, using an FTP client in SFTP mode, go to your saved archive and upload the files back to your hosting account.  You can recover the full archive by uploading it to your hosting account, or you can just upload a part of it.  For example you have have been editing your theme, and caused an issue, you cann select just the files under wp-content/themes to recover.

VIDEO: Recovering the WordPress File Base

Running time for this video is approximately 2.5 minutes.

View the video>>

Discuss this Post

If you would like to discuss this topic, please leave a coment

Next In the Series

The next part of the backup and recovery tutorial looks at restoring your database archive.

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

Backup and Recovery: Restoring Your File Base

Table of contents for Backup and Recovery

1. Backup and Recovery: An Introduction
2. Backup and Recovery: Backing Up Your File Base
3. Backup and Recovery: Backing Up Your Database
4. Backup and Recovery: Backup Plugins
5. Backup and Recovery: Restoring Your Database
6. Backup and Recovery: Restoring Your File Base

In later posts in this series I want to talk about using plugins to backup your database, but in this post I want to go back to basics and take you through manually backing up your database with the MYSQL tools your hosting company provides.

I want to do this to give you an understanding of the database and what is required of a manual backup before we move onto automating this process with plugins.

What To backup

WordPress uses a database system called MYSQL to store all of the variable data of your site.

To create an adequate database backup you need to backup all of the system tables created by WordPress and all of the additional tables created by plugin installs or related but none WordPress systems such as forums or affiliate software.

A quick glossary of terms, a database is a container for all of your data, you will have one database per WordPress install.  The database will contain many tables, tables are containers of collections of data organised by purpose.  For example there is a table for your posts, a table for your users and passwords etc.

Why You Need To Backup Your Database

Your blog is a dynamic thing, every time you add a post, receive a comment , get a link, changes are made to your database.  All variable options of your site such as users, revision history of your posts, categories, plugin data and tags are all stored in tables inside of your database.  This needs to be archived on a regular basis so you can recover in the event of a system failure.

How It Is Backed Up

My Preferred method is to save an export of the database.  This is a file containing all of the commands necessary to recreate the tables and then to populate the tables with data and to setup any relationships such as indexes.

For the rest of this tutorial I will focus on using the phpmyadmin utility.  This is the most widespread MYSQL admin tool supplied by hosting companies.  Please contact your hosting company for details on accessing phpmyadmin.

For full details of this tool please visit www.phpmyadmin.net

Once in your phpmyadmin tool, select the database your wordpress install uses and then navigate to the export tab, you will see the screen shown below:

Make sure that you check the Add DROP TABLE /VIEW/PROCEDURE options to make recovery in the event of a catastrophe easier.

As I have said I like to export the database as a SQL file of commands, this is selected in the left hand column, lastly I like to save the file to my local file system, this is done by clicking on save as file near the bottom of the page.

Once done, click on go and an export file will be created, this will take a certain amount of time dependant upon the size of your database.

VIDEO: BackingUp Your WordPress Database

Running time for this video is approximately 6 minutes.

View the video>>

Discuss this Post

If you would like to discuss this topic, please  leave a comment.

Next In the Series

The next part of the backup and recovery tutorial looks at backup using plugins.

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

Backup and Recovery: Backing Up Your Database

Table of contents for Backup and Recovery

1. Backup and Recovery: An Introduction
2. Backup and Recovery: Backing Up Your File Base
3. Backup and Recovery: Backing Up Your Database
4. Backup and Recovery: Backup Plugins
5. Backup and Recovery: Restoring Your Database
6. Backup and Recovery: Restoring Your File Base

In this post I want to talk about backing up your file base, what the file base is, it’s content and why this needs special treatment.

This post comes with a screencast video to show you exactly how to backup the files in question.

What Is The File Base

It is my name to distinguish the physical files which make up WordPress as opposed to the Database which contains all of your content such as posts, pages, comment, tags and categories.

The following directories make up your files base:

• wp-content
• wp-admin
• wp-include
• Blog Root

Why Back This Up I Can Download the files

Yes you can, but the file base also contains variable information that is not easily downloaded from the WordPress.org site such as configuration files, themes and any changes you made to your theme, all of your plugins and any media files uploaded to your blog such as images or video.  You need to archives all of these alongside your WordPress scripts.

How To Backup Your File Base

Take one FTP client of your choosing, my favourites are Filezilla or the Firefox plugin FireFTP, and navigate to the root of your blog install, select all of the files there including all the sub-directories and make a copy of them to a local file system on your computer.

I like to copy them into a date stamped directory so I can create multiple copies of my filebase.

Archiving Your Backup

You have a backup of your files on your machine, not to make you paranoid, but what happens if you PC crashes, you loose all of your backups, can I suggest you make an archive of your archives.

Save them to a CD, upload them to an online storage site, check out Google docs, that’s free or attach them to an email and send them to yourself if you use a service like Gmail.

VIDEO: How To Backup Your File Base manually

Here is the screencast video to show you exactly how to backup your file base.  Running time approx 5 minutes.

View the video>>

Discuss this Post

If you would like to discuss this topic, please  leave a comment.

Next In the Series

The next part of the backup and recovery tutorial looks at backing up your database.

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

Backup and Recovery: Backing Up Your File Base

Table of contents for Backup and Recovery

1. Backup and Recovery: An Introduction
2. Backup and Recovery: Backing Up Your File Base
3. Backup and Recovery: Backing Up Your Database
4. Backup and Recovery: Backup Plugins
5. Backup and Recovery: Restoring Your Database
6. Backup and Recovery: Restoring Your File Base

In a series of blog posts, I would like to take you through the process of backing up, and then recovering your WordPress blog.  I will look at why this process is so important, all of the components required to make a full backup, how to do a backup, then I will look at the most important aspect, how to recover your archived data and files.

The first part of this tutorial takes you through an introduction to the backup and recovery processes.

Why Do I Need A Backup?

Computer systems go phutt on an all too regular basis, having a backup allows you to rebuild your blog with the minimum effort.  Consider the time and effort you have put into developing your posts and your cool theme,  how many people have taken the trouble to leave a comment and the links you have built up on Google, all of this needs to be archived so you can recover it in the event of a catastrophic failure, hacking attack, hardware failure or user error.

If you have to recover your blog from scratch without a backup, this will take a huge amount of time (time equals money) , you will loose a lot of your blog’s traction and any authority you have built with the search engines may be affected.

Take a moment to work out the cost to you or your organisation if your blog fails and cannot be recovered quickly.

What You Need To Backup

There are two components you need to consider when doing a WordPress backup, the data in your MYSQL database and what I call the filebase or the files which make up a WordPress install.

The database is commonly backed up by most people, but who considers their filebase?  The filebase includes all of your uploaded media (images, video, podcast etc), your theme, your plugins and the files which make Wordporess run; the scripts and configuration files.

A partial backup of only one of these components is of little use, you need to backup both.

How Often Should You Backup?

The frequency of your backups should be done in line with how often you update your blog, if you write posts daily, backup daily, if you are uploading lots of media, backup the filebase frequently.  Do it often, and do it early.

My preference is once daily for my database and weekly for my code base.

You should also perform a backup before any major change to your blog.  You should backup before you update the code, add plugins, change the theme or add a third party product such as a forum which will share the same database.

Keep Multiple Copies of Your Archive

Having multiple point in time backups allows me to restore to a particular period before my failure happened. If you only keep one archive you may reimport the problem when you do your restore.

An example is probably helpful here. Imagine your blog has been hacked on Monday and rogue code has been added to your site, then imagine you only notice the hack on Wednesday, your single point in time archive from Tuesday will still contain the rogue code from Monday, you need an archive from Sunday to sucessfully recover to an operational point in time.

A good example of a retention policy is to keep a weeks worth of daily backups, then to keep four weekly backups.  This means you can recover up to a month in the past.

Archiving My Backups

If you keep all of your archives on your local hard drive, there is a change you could loose these, I recommend you archive your archives.  This can be done by copying your data sets to cd, or to an online service such as Google docs.  Just make sure you have  an archive you can recover from if your pc or mac crashes.

I use Gmail as a sneaky way to archive my backups, I have setup a rule to move my backup files directly to a storage area  automatically, this means I have a number of checkpoints with my backups so I can do a point in time recovery.  I use plugins to send me those emails, I will explain more about this in the backup plugins section later in this course.

Testing Your Backup

It is all well and good having a backup, but have you tested your recovery process, I wrote a guest post on Problogger about this subject, check it out at http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/02/12/testing-your-blog-backup.

What’s Next in the Series?

The rest of this series is much more practical, I will take you through backing up and recovering your system.

Backing up the file base and the database manually

I will show you how to manually create an archive of your file base, or the files which make up your install such as wordpress scripts, theme files, plugin files and any media you upload such as images or video.

I will then move onto backing up your database.  This is where your blog content is saved your posts, paghes, comments, tags categories and the variable data which allow syou system to run such as user information, plugin configuration or blog options.

Backup Plugins

I have shown you how to manually back your database and file base, this is an important learning process to understand what is required for a good backup, but manual backups are not very efficient, I will move onto a section on using plugins to automate your backup procedure.

Recovering The Files and Database

I was once told by a system administrator that you are only as good as your last backup, I agree, but add the caveat, you are only as good as your last backup your know how to recover.

The last parts of this tutorial will show you how to recover your two types of archive.  This is often overlooked.  Having the knowlege to recover your blog when it has crashed is very important.

Discuss this Post

If you would like to discuss this topic, please  leave a comment

Next In the Series

The next part of the backup and recovery tutorial looks at backing up the code base.

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

Backup and Recovery: An Introduction

Photo by James Cridland

Imagine the scene, your blog has gone to hell in a hand cart and all of your posts have been lost, your blog backup is FUBAR or you simply don’t have one!

FECK ARSE

All is not lost, the nice boys and girls at Google may have a solution for you.

Enter The Google Cache

Google holds a cached copy all of your web pages as part of its indexing and analysis process.  Now isn’t that hepful.  If you know how you can recover your lost posts from Google and re-enter them into your blog.

Before you get all overexcited, this will only work for blog posts which have been published and then indexed by Google, so if you loose a brand new posts, it is probably gone, but anything a couple of days old will possbly be there.

Recovering From The Cache

Here is the fun bit, you can recover your lost posts by using some clever search phrases and selecting data from the cache.

Go to Google and type in site:{my domain name} for example site:wpdude.com

This will bring back a list of all pages indexed by Google for your site.  If you look closely, there is a link marked cache next to each article, click on this and there you have it a copy of your post.

Simple cut and paste the text into a new blog post and  re-publish it.  Take pains to have the permalink in the same format ot avoid duplicated content on the Google index.  The peeps at the Googleplex don’t like that.

From FECK ARSE to WOOT!!! in a few easy steps.

Now Says after Me..

I {enter your name} do hereby swear to take regular backups.

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

Feck Arse, and Google Cache

photo by timothymorgan

The most amiable Darren Rowse of Problogger.net gave me the opportunity to write a guest post on testing your backup strategy.

I want to encourage people to test their backups before they need to do an emergency restore.

See the full post at:

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/02/12/testing-your-blog-backup

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

Guest Post on Problogger

In my opinion there are six key times you should perform a backup of your wordpress blog.

1. When You Update WordPress

The WordPress code is updated regularly, but before you even consider FTPing the latest shiny version up to your host, backup the existing code base and database.

2. When You Install a Plugin

I am guilty of plugin addiction and I install loads of new and glittery plugins to my blogs all of hte time, and I often do not backup before I do this.  YOU SHOULD backup befire installing plugins.  Some of them amend your wordpress database, some drastically chaneg how your blog works.  Have a checkpoint to return to if the plugin causes problems.

3. When You Install/Change Your Theme

Changing your theme may not seem like a huge event, but consider that many people customise their themes, take a backup of your changes before you change themes and delete your hard design work.

4.When You Have Written Some Quality Content

The last post you clicked publish on was awesome and went straight to the front page of Digg.  You need to protect this asset by backing up your content.

5.When You Install Other Applications

Many blogs have systems other than WordPress installed on their websites.  I am thinking of things like forums and affiliate systems.  Many of these will share the MYSQL database that WordPress uses.  Backup your WP config and data before begining the install process.

6.Regularly

This is n0t really a point in time, but my last key timing for backups is to backup regularly.  Check out the many backup plugins such as Filosofo’s excellent utility and create a scheduled job to backup your blog.  I have my plugin create the backup and send it via email to me.  Then I simply skip the email to my archive.  I know I have a daily backup ready for any eventuiality.

As a parting note backup often and soon.  Keep a number of checkpoints so you can recover to a point in time.

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

6 Key Times You Should Backup Your WordPress Blog