How To Take Complete Backup of WordPress Database and Files

If you are a blogger then you might be aware of the importance of taking WordPress database backup regularly. Not only database backup, you must also take backup of other files like images and videos of your blog once in a while. This is very essential for every blogger as you may get hacked someday or lose your data for some other reasons.
It is always recommended to take regular backups of your blog to be secure and safer. Recently my blog got hacked and if I had not the backup with me then it could be really difficult for me to recover my blog.
Most of the people will recommend you to take backup of your database only but from my recent blog hack I have learnt that we should also take backup of our blog files at least twice in a month.

When should you perform the backup

Data can be lost any time without any notification. There can be many reasons for data loss. A hacker can hack your blog, your server can crash, natural disasters etc. If you are totally dependent on your blog for making money then it becomes more important task for you. You should perform backup of your blog according to following schedule:
Database backup: Daily (1 or 2 times)
Files backup: Weekly (or twice in a month)

How to Backup WordPress Database Manually

It is always good to learn manual ways to do things. In case automatic method fails, you can do the things manually. In the following few steps you can take WordPress database backup very easily.

• Sign in to your cPanel and open phpMyAdmin.
• Now select the database associated with your WordPress blog.
• Once you selected your database, click on Export tab on the top.
  
• Now chose the preferred mode of compression – None, zipped or gzipped and press Go button to take backup. Preferred mode of compression is gzipped.
• That’s all to take database backup.

How to Backup WordPress Database Automatically

You have already learnt how to backup WordPress database manually. Now you will learn how to automate this process. WP-DB-Backup is a WordPress plugin that does this task for you automatically. You can chose prefered schedule to take backup once daily, twice daily, once hourly or once weekly. I highly recommend you to install this plugin.

How to Backup WordPress Files

To take backup of blog files, follow the following steps:

• Login to your FTP.
• Go to public_html directory and download wp-content folder to your computer. All of your blog related files that you have uploaded like images, video, themes and plugins are present in wp-content folder only.
• That’s all to take backup of your files.

This is the simple tutorial to take backup of WordPress database and files. I hope you like this tutorial. If you ever lost your blog data, we would love to know about your experience to recover your blog.