On November 11th McColo was turned off for hosting many spam, child porn, and malware sites (article at WashingtonPost.com). But although heavily infused with kiddie porn, malware, and spambot networks, ther were more than a few legitimate sites hosted there too. And now they’re scrambling to rebuild their blogs, sites, and all their content somewhere else. The depressing thing is thinking about how much work the legitimate (and now down) sites are going thru without a good backup to recover with. So they’re having a really tough time right now.
But you can protect yourself now by getting those WordPress sites enabled for backup to internet. We prototyped, tested, and then put together a way that anyone with a WordPress site can use to automatically backup.
Automated WordPress Backup to Internet
A. First off, choose the email address you want to use to receive the initial backups. As long as it’s one that downloads to your local system (no web email for this, use Outlook, SeaMonkey, Evolution, you get the idea) you don’t want to use a email address hosted with your domain as that could also fail with the rest of your site.
B. There is the hard way (manually with CRON) or the easy way (google and download WP-DB-Backup and WP-Cron) to automate the process. Activate both plugins in your WordPress plugin management page after you’ve downloaded, upzipped, and uploaded them to your site. WP-Cron includes a whole bunch of various plugins. Just activate the ones called WP-Cron and WP-DB-Backup.
C. Now, with the plugins activated, click the “Manage” tab in WordPress. You’ll see a menu item called “Backup”. This is the one you need. There are some optional settings for doing manual backups. Skip that and go to the section titled “Scheduled Backup” (at the bottom). If you don’t see it, you don’t have WP-Cron enabled, so make sure it is. In the settings for this section, set the schedule to “Daily” (or whatever timeframe is appropriate for your site). Use the address you decided to use where it says “Email backup to:”. The final thing is the option to include non default WordPress tables. We think bakcing them all up is the safe way to do it. Backing up all native WordPress tables is the default. Click Submit after you’ve selected any other tables.
D. Now the Rock Solid part. Grab yourself a copy of OPENRSM CloudBackup. It’s a backup to internet system that’s easy, cheap, and reliable. Linux, MAC, and Windows users alike will find it dead simple to set up. Make sure the selection is made to backup your email folders. You can set the schedule by selecting “Daily” (that’s what we do).
E. There you go, that’s it! Your WordPress SQL backups should be emailed to you and they’ll be using the backup to internet features of CloudBackup to make sure you don’t lose your site. Check the account and see the first backups happen. You can now quit worrying and let the plugins, your email account, and CloudBackup do all the work. Just make sure to delete older backups from your email occasionally and your work is done.
And if your host should crash? Fast and easy recovery is now enabled and your not worrying what will happen to you if your host goes away.