How To Backup Your WordPress Database

Keeping consistent backups of your blog’s database is something everybody should be doing yet it is something that unfortunately a lot of people don’t do! They spend countless hours writing content, getting back links, submitting to social networks and what have you only to have something go wrong (and they do) and not have a safety net.

In this post I would like to show you 2 different ways to backup your WordPress database; doing it manually and through the use of a plugin. While using a plugin makes it a whole lot easier you may be the type of person that doesn’t like to use plugins or you already have too many installed. Also, it never hurts to know how to do something anyways in case your plugin stops working.

Manual backup using phpMyAdmin

Lets first take a look at the process of manually creating a backup file of your WordPress database. In order to do this you are going to need to log into your web hosting account and find the link to a program called phpMyAdmin. If you are using cPanel you can find the link usually under the Databases section on the main menu. If you use GoDaddy as your web hosting provider you will need to log into your hosting account, select Hosting from the left hand menu, click Manage Account under the appropriate account, select MySQL from the Databases tab and then click on Open Manager for the site you want to backup.

Once you are inside of phpMyAdmin you should see a screen that looks similar to the one in the screen shot below.

Once you are at this page you will need to select the database for the site that you want to backup from the list on the left hand side. After selecting the database from the list you will be presented with the home page for that particular database.

From this page you are going to want to click the Export tab located in the navigation tabs that spans across the bar at the top of the database table’s list. After the Export page is loaded you should see a screen as shown below.

Lets go over a quick explanation of this page just so you can get a general idea. Keeping things simple I will briefly discuss the left hand section of the page as the right hand side is for more advanced options that don’t apply to us.

The first thing you will notice is a multiple select box that lists the tables inside of the database for your WordPress blog. There should be 10 tables listed here assuming you don’t have any plugins that created an extra table and their names will be; wp_comments, wp_links, wp_options, wp_postmeta, wp_posts, wp_terms, wp_term_relationships, wp_term_taxonomy, wp_usermeta and wp_users. Make sure that they are all selected by clicking on the Select All link listed above the box.

Below the box you will see a list of available file extensions that you can save the database backup to. For this post we are going to be creating a backup as an SQL file, so if it isn’t already selected make sure you select that radio box.

Moving on we come to the box that spans across the screen that allows you to save the backup as a file, choose a name and also choose the compression technology. Make sure you check the box that has Save as file listed next to it and under the File name template input box fill in an appropriate name for your WordPress database backup.

A common method to naming a backup file is to include the name of the site as well as the date of the backup. Example – wpthemesupport-1-13-2009 would be an appropriate file name

From here you can choose which compression technology you would like to use for your backup file. Selecting none will just give you a .SQL file while selecting the other options (zip and gzip) will create an archive file of the backup.

Now all that you have to do is click Go located on the right hand side of the box which allows you to download the backup file to your computer. Congratulations, you just manually created a backup of your WordPress database!

Using the WP-DB-Backup Plugin

Earlier in this post I mentioned that I would show you how to manually backup your database as well as how to use a plugin, so for the following methods I will be using the WordPress Database Backup plugin which can be downloaded from the developer’s page or the WordPress.org Plugins Directory.

After installing the plugin and activating it you can find the options page listed under Backup under the Tools menu in your WordPress Administration Dashboard. Once you upon the page you will notice 3 different sections with different options.

The first section lists the database tables for your current blog. You should see a list of the 10 default WordPress tables as well as any other tables that may have been created on your database from a plugin. Should you have extra tables and want to back them up as well make sure to select the proper ones from the list provided.

The second section lists available backup options such as saving the file to your web server, downloading to your computer or to have the plugin send you a backup to a specified email address. Should you choose to save the backup file to your server the plugin provides the path where it will place the file on your server.

The third section is my favorite part of the plugin’s features and why I use and recommend it. This section allows you to schedule a backup once hourly, twice daily, once daily, once weekly or to not schedule anything at all. Once you have selected the backup frequency you are allowed to provide an email address that you would like the file to be sent to as well as selecting other tables that may exist alongside the default WordPress tables.

Once your options have been made, just click on the Schedule Backup button and you are set!

Feedback!

If you read this post and understood it great! Let me know in the comments below. If you are still having issues and can't get it figured out, you are more than welcome to leave a comment or send me an email using the contact form and I'll do what I can to help!