The one action that I hadn’t yet taken was something that now, a week later, I couldn’t put off any longer – that of protecting my blog. First, I want to protect it against any inadvertent mistake that I might make that could corrupt the database.

And secondly, like it or not, our blogs and websites are susceptible to hackers. It’s easy to think that this is the kind of problem that happens only to someone else, but it’s happened to me before. Thankfully, I had a backup that was no more than a week old, so I was able to recover most information.

Easy to overlook, but critically important that we don’t, is the need to back up our blog. When we first install and setup our blog, there are many processes that go on in the background, including the creation of a database. Stored in that database are blog configuration settings, theme information and edits that we may have made, posts, comments, and so forth. The entire substance of our blog is contained in that database.

If our blog is hacked or made corrupt inadvertently, and if we have backed up our database, we can restore our blog from the backup. Depending on how frequently we back up, we still may lose some information, but that’s  a heck of a lot better than starting over from scratch.

While there are ways to manually backup the database through our hosting service’s administrative control panel, the easiest way to back up your blog is with a plugin. Now, you’ve got to be a little careful with plugins, because there are a lot of them, and not all of them are compatible with later versions of your blogging platform – which for me, and hopefull for you too, is WordPress (it’s the best).

When I look for a plugin, I may perform a simple search at Google for the type of plugin that I’m looking for. But my preferred method is to go to the plugin directory on the WordPress website:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/

Once there, I do a search by keyword – in this case ‘backup’ (without the quotes). In sifting through the search results, I look for three different features:

1. Compatibility: is the plugin compatible with the version of WordPress I’m using (v. 2.7 at the time of this post)

2. Ease of installation: just a few clicks? How much configuration is needed?

3. User ratings: while this is something to look at, you must also take it with a grain of salt. Sometimes there may be only one or two reviews – and it could have that five star rating because the plugin developers themselves have rated it.

The plugin that I ultimately chose was WP-DBManager, just one of many excellent plugins by Lester Chan. I downloaded the file, extracted it on my hard drive, and uploaded it to my WP-content/Plugins folder. Then I logged in to my WordPress admin panel and activated the plugin.

Upon activation, a new section, entitled ‘Database’, appears in the left sidebar of the admin panel (the positioning of the plugin options will be different for pre-2.7 releases of WordPress).

Here’s the homepage of the plugin:

http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming/php/#wp-dbmanager

One of the nice features about this plugin is that automatic backups can be scheduled. By default the automatic backup option is set to one week, but because I’m making a lot of changes to my blog right now, and adding a great deal of new content, I changed the backup schedule to every three days.

The ease with which this plugin works was impressive. When the backup option is selected, the plugin scans the directories to make sure that the right directory structure is in place and that the permissions of the relevent files are set properly.

Click the ‘backup’ button and the backup is completed in a matter of seconds. I don’t know that all backup plugins are this easy, but this one was. If you haven’t yet backed up your blog, do it soon. It will be good both for your blog and your peace of mind.