Build My Site for Free

Hi, guys, and welcome to BuildMySiteForFree.com.  Today’s tutorial is going to be about something very important, and that’s backing up your WordPress blog.  And we’re going to do this by using the WordPress Database Backup plugin, and it’s so important because if something ever goes wrong with your computer, you know that you have all of your information that you have created – all of your plugins – you have it all backed up.

So the first thing we want to do is install this plugin, the WordPress Database Backup plugin, and you can do this by going to BuildMySiteForFree.com. You can click on the plugins link right here on the top right-hand corner.  And like I’ve mentioned in other
plugin videos, they’re all in alphabetical order.  But for this one, you can actually just go down to page 19, and it’s the very last column, and it’s your WordPress Database Backup.

So from here, you want to download it to your computer as a zip file. Remember, you always want all of your plugins and themes that you
download to be a zip file for it to work. And then you want to come back to your Dashboard, and you want to scroll down the navigation menu to the plugins link, and you want to click “Add New.”

And after you get to the Install Plugins page, you want to click “Upload” and make sure that you upload this file.  And here, you would just choose the file and install it right from here. And once you’ve installed it, it will give you an option to activate it, and you’ll click that link.  But now that we have it activated to our computer, we want to choose our backup options.

So by doing this, you want to come back to your navigation menu, and where you see my mouse arrow, you want to open up the Tools link and scroll down to where it says “Backup.”  So now that you’ve activated this plugin,  this is where it will appear.  And this will bring you to the backup settings page, and we have three options here.

Our first option is the Tables option, and this is where you’re going to choose what files you want backed up.  So automatically, the core WordPress tables here are going to be backed up, and it’ll show a list right here, as far as comments, links, options, posts.

Two things I recommend is to check off both of these boxes.  The first one is to exclude spam comments.  There’s no reason to back up your spam comments, so I would go ahead and check off that box.  And then you can also check off the post revisions because once you’ve published a post, all you really want is that published post backed up.  You really don’t need the revisions backed up. Both of these are your options, so if you do want to exclude them, which I recommend, you just check the boxes off.

And then over here, you have a few boxes that you can choose if you want backed up or not.  So most of the time, it’s going to be your plugins.  So I have the Contact Form plugin, the Max Banner Ad plugin, the OpenID, Identity Relationship plugin.  So if I want these backed up, I
would just check off the boxes as I want them to be backed up or not.   And these will probably be different for you, according to what you have uploaded and activated to your blog.

And the next section we have is our Backup Options section, and there are three choices to choose from of where we want to back up our files.  So first, you can back them up to your server.  You have them saved to your server.  You can have them downloaded to your computer, which is usually what I like to do because I’ll have them right there on my hard drive. And then you can choose where you want to email…if you want to back them up to your email.  So by default, your email will come up here, and if you want to change it, you just type what email you want it backed up to.  And then if you want it backed up right this second, you can just click “Backup Now” and it will go ahead and do so.

And the very last option we have here before we save our changes is to schedule a backup.  So you can choose whether or not you want to
ever back them up, which I’m assuming if you’re downloading this plugin, it’s not going to be never.  And you can choose to back them up once hourly, twice daily, once daily, once weekly.  I recommend to do it once daily.  If you are using your blog all day long, you might want to choose something like once hourly or twice daily.

And then once again, you have the options to schedule a backup for any of those plugins up at the top or anything that you have here in this list will be different for whatever you have.  And then you’d want to click “Schedule Backup” if you do want to go ahead and schedule it.

And this is how you backup all of your information after you’ve installed the WordPress Database Backup plugin.  And thank you for watching.