In the previous posts on backing up your blog I showed you the manual way to backup your WordPress install, I want to move on and talk about using plugins to automate this process.

This post comes with a screencast to show you how to install and use these plugins.

Manual Versus Automatic

I spent time taking your through the manual backup process before I showed you the plugins so you have a thorough understanding of what to backup and how to do a one off manual backup, but now I want to show you how to automate the process using plugins and timed backups.

Automating the process of backup is very important, if you are anything like me, repetitive jobs become very dull, very quickly and as a result repetitive jobs are often overlooked.  It will be at that exact moment that you need to recover and you have forgotten or neglected to do a full backup.

Using my recommended plugins you can setup a backup schedule and have hourly, daily or weekly backups sent to your email address.  All you then need to do is archive those backups for later use when/if required.

The Plugins ..

I use the following two plugins to automate the backup of my blogs:

WordPress Backup (By BTE) – for file base backup

WordPress Database Backup – for database backup

There are many more at the WordPress plugin directory, have a look at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tags/backup

WordPress Baclup (By BTE)

This is a great little plugin which takes a copy of your plugin, theme and upload directories and copies them into a directory under wp-content as a zip file.  The zip file is then sent out via email.

I have this set to run once a week, but you can set it to daily or monthly.  There is no on-demand option.

WordPress Database Backup

WP Database backup allows you to backup all, or a selection of your MYSQL tables, and have that backup saved to your hosting server, downloaded or sent via email.   Like WordPress backup there is a scheduler but there is also an on-demand function, useful if you want a quick backup before a change to your blog.,

The output is a SQL command file which when run against the database to recreate the tables and data.  Please note a certain level of MYSQL knowledge is required to recover from this method.  This will be covered in the recovery modules.

The Missing Link

My complete WordPress install i.e. wp-includes, wp-admin and the files in my blog root are not backed up by these two plugins so I keep a copy of my latest WordPress install files to hand, just in case.

VIDEO: Using backup plugins

I will show you how to install, configure and create backups using my recommended plugins, running time aprox 6 mins

[S3 bucket=backupplugins text=View the video>>]backupplugins.html[/s3]

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Next In the Series

The next part of the backup and recovery tutorial looks at restoring the file base.