It is quite essential to regularly back up your blog data. More so when you are hit with a bad weather in your servers. That is when you see the whole world crumbling down. Imagine me, when my servers crashed and I had no access to the c-panel and neither could I ftp to the servers as well. And yes, I was without a single back up of my more than 30 posts on Techkeyla, and another 50 I believe on OneKnightStands. That’s when you actually start re-reading your posts, in a state of hallucination that is. So to avoid such levels of trauma in the blogging world, back up is a must.

Now there are quite a bit of plugins in Wordpress which offer similar features and facilities. I found this one to be quite simple to use, very fast and with all the necessary tools needed. It is called , shockingly Wordpress backup, and the link is here. http://www.ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup/

How to install: Download the zp file from going to the link here. Extract the zip file to a local folder and have the php file uploaded in your plugins folder of your wordpress folder. It should be inside :wp-content.
Now once it is uploaded, go to your Wordpress admin console and go to the plugins tab. Hit Activate to activate the plugin and voila, job is done, but not yet. Next is to actually back up your DB. So, go to Manage–> Backup.
It should now show you a page with Backup options as to where you want to back up. The options are - On the server in a folder, download it to your local machine, or email it to a specified address.
Besides these, you can also set the Scheduled Backup. Most of us have daily posts, so an hourly backup doesn’t make much sense.A weekly backup also might face the risk of running behind a couple of posts. To be noted: You need to give write permissions for wp-content folder to enable Back Up files to be saved.
P.S. Do a manual back up once in a while, just to make sure that your data doesn’t vanish if your auto-backups fail.

Tip of the Day: If you have a Gmail ID, which I believe all of us do, set the filter for the given mails sent as backup attachments and you’ll have an arranged inbox of your backups. And the backup files are in a gun zipped SQL, and have convenient naming conventions and their date of backup can be easily identified . Happy Blogging!

Thanks to Brajeshwar for all the help in backing up my blogs.
Pics Courtesy:Jbiljr