I love WordPress. Just about every site I’ve ever designed has used WordPress as a CMS. I did create a site in CMS Made Simple once, and I’m not sure it was so “simple.” Then again, it wasn’t a simple site… it was designed to track stats for a Blood Bowl league (think fumbbl). It worked, but it wasn’t elegant.

But I digress. WordPress is awesome. You can have a blog, like this. You can set it up more like a static site (see this portfolio site, Olinda Gibbons Photography). You can do… just about whatever you want if you get a little creative with the template.

What’s more, there are tons of useful plug-ins waiting for you, so you don’t have to spend as much time custom coding stuff. One simple task I needed a solution for was backuping up my WordPress database and files. I used to use WordPress Database Backup, but I don’t think it’s compatible with WordPress 3.0 and it didn’t actually fulfill all my needs.

After some searching, I finally found a suitable replacement this morning: Updraft.

How I Use It

The cool thing about Updraft is that it doesn’t just backup your database. What good is the database if all your uploads are gone? You’re gonna have a lot of wholes in your posts where there used to be pictures!

Updraft takes this into account and backs up four things – your database (pretty important), your plugins (which you might not have locally if you installed them all automatically), your uploads, and your themes (well, you should have this saved locally for development purposes anyway).

You can schedule the back-ups. You can select a custom folder to save it in (anywhere on the server; not just in the wp-content folder). If you have a cloud file storage service, you can send the files there. And you can specify how many backups it should retain, so you don’t end up with a hundred backups floating around your server by the end of the year.

This solution is perfect for me.  I set Updraft up on all of my WordPress sites so that it automatically backs everything up. It dumps it into a folder above the public_html folder (something like /home/backups). From there, I can set up SyncBackPro with a scheduled backup to download the backups from the server and store them locally on my external hard drive.

So what are you waiting for? If you don’t have a backup plug-in installed already, go get Updraft. Hopefully you’ll never need it… but it could be a life saver.