If you are a new blogger, or even if you’ve been blogging for a long time(!) it’s important to understand that just because you save and publish a post it doesn’t mean that it is reliably saved forever on your host. From time to time hosting companies have problems, and sometimes it happens that files are corrupted or lost irretrievably. It’s also possible that in tinkering with code you can make changes that you don’t intend to make, even if you’re quite sure that you know what you’re doing. Another source of problems for bloggers in the area of losing data or even entire websites is that the addition of add-ons or templates to your blogging software installation can sometimes result in myriad unintended problems. This happens especially when a template or add-on hasn’t been adequately tested against the latest version of the blogging software. It’s at times like this when you will wish there was something you could do about your loss. It happened to me once. But it won’t happen again!
The way to avoid problems of this sort is to proactively back up your files before you have a problem. You can manually create a zipped copy of your entire website and store it on your hard drive or some other media, or e-mail it to yourself. The problem is that if you’re an active blogger, to manually create backup files on a regular basis will become very time consuming, in addition to requiring a little bit of technical know-how.
Luckily, most blogging software packages have an add-on/plug-in that automates the process of backing up your site so that problems, regardless of whose fault they are, can be handled by reconstructing your entire blog from the backup if necessary. Wordpress in particular has many options when it comes to automatically backing up your blog files. One that I can recommend personally is the WordPress database backup plug-in by Austin Matzko. It is very easy to use, and lets you immediately back up your WordPress blog and e-mail the resulting file to an address you specify. You can also very easily select to have backups performed automatically on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, and again, have the backups sent to you.
Don’t wait until you really, really need it to become convinced of the value of having a reliable, automatic blogging tool that lets you backup your files. Pick one and install it today.
