Tag Archives: online backup

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 →

Backblaze Is Not For Me

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I’m constantly terrified that my data isn’t safe.

Both of my Mac’s are backed up on a Timemachine, it’s a 1gb Western Digital external. It does a good job but has now filled up completely and thus, my old backups are starting to get deleted.  Sad.

So there’s one problem, limited space, and we haven’t gotten to Backblaze just yet.

My entire iTunes library has it’s own external 1tb Western Digital drive.  It’s the MyStudio with the FW800.  Unfortunately, that drive is down to 40gb of free space and quickly going down from there.

I thought I’d use an online service to backup my data.  My iTunes drive is worth thousands of dollars with the media it holds and the idea that it might crash on me… absolutely terrifying.

I decided on Backblaze because of its Apple integration and ability to backup attached, external hard drives.  It looked like it was a go! I got into the beta testing and got it all setup.

Only one problem.

Do you know how long it takes to backup 1.175tb of data?! I was only trying to backup the iMac and iTunes drive.

Yeah… I don’t have 125 days!

Another problem?  Even if I pause Backblaze, it will start backing up things and eating up all of my bandwidth.

Even though it’s only uploading data to Backblaze, I am unable to do even the simplest of internet functions like a Google search.

Uninstalling Backblaze wasn’t easy either. Even after you uninstall the app, you then have to delete the preference pane from System Preferences.  AppCleaner made this easier for me but a novice might find it too difficult.

And I do realize that taking 125 days to upload 1.175gb to Backblaze isn’t their fault.  They have great feature though where they will send you a hard drive with all your backed up data if downloading it all isn’t your bag. Unfortunately, pricing for this service are not specified on their site. Now if only they’d send you a drive to back up your data to and mail to them to speed up this backup process…

So, it looks like I am just going to have to bite the bullet and get the Drobo. It doesn’t have any of these problems plus allows me to move all of my drives into one place with redundancy.

Just gotta find the money!

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