Tag Archives: Gmail

How to Automatically Backup a WordPress Blog

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The other day I had a friend ask me for a best practice in backing up his self-hosted WordPress blog. At some point his blog crashed and he lost just about everything. This is no good, especially when backing up and restoring WordPress has become so easy!

I follow a rule of data security that no data is secure until it lives in three different locations. For my blog that looks like this.

  1. Original file on my computer
  2. Copy on my portable external drive
  3. Copy on Drobo as the archive

The fail here is that at any given moment, two or three of these might be in the same place. If I’m at home with my laptop, my portable hard drive and my Drobo, and my apartment blows up, I’m done for. Your third space should be someone in the Cloud or some other safe online backup location away from your other backups.

For my blog it is much easier. I use two plugins, WP-Database and UpDraft to do daily and weekly backups of my MySQL database and the actual files behind my blog. In addition, my host provides daily, weekly and monthly backups.

Here is my backup structure.

Most hosts will only backup your website files, not your database. They leave this up to you. But with a blog, all your most important content is probably the posts which live in the database! Let’s learn how to create a fail-proof* blog backup. Continue reading →

Finding You Again…

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Image representing AOL as depicted in CrunchBase

Image via CrunchBase

Through my blog I have made several friends.  One of the earliest was an awesome guy from Australia who used to comment here a good bit named Will C John.

Will, if you are reading this, you should email me.  I’ve been missing you and your email address is no good anymore!  It’s very sad.

What do you do when you’ve lost someone electronically?  In the olden days we could always open the phone book.  Remember when our phone numbers were tied to a home and we could take them with us when we moved within a city?  Remember when we stuck with the same cellphone provider because we wanted to keep the number or because we were stuck in a contract?  Remember when the same held true for email addresses?  If we had AOL as our ISP, which I mean, who didn’t back in the day; we kept that email address forever, or until people made fun of us enough that we dropped it for Yahoo!, Mailcity or Hotmail.

That is until both of those fell out of favor, now it’s all about Gmail!

So how do I find my lost internet friends?  How do I find Matt, the Lincoln University professor I dated after Geoff and I broke up?  He was so wonderful, nice, smart and attractive.  Our relationship was doomed, he was moving to the Northeast to teach Public Policy at a big Ivy League university and I was moving to California at the same time.  I miss him too though and would love to know what he is up to.

How does one find these lost friends?

Interestingly enough, both of their aol.com email addresses no longer work.  The professor’s cellphone has changed and I’ve lost Will from Australia’s number through the several cellphone changes I’ve had.

If you guys are out there, and reading this, email me.  I would love to catch up, talk.  You meant so much to me and still have a place in my heart.

Who have you lost?  Have you ever found that lost person in your life?  How?

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