Back Up WordPress Blog From Hostgator

Now that you know how to install WordPress but knowing how to back up is equally important in managing a blog. It is a good practice to back it up from time to time to avoid any unwanted interruption for example accident deletion (Ouchh!), restoring your file amendment and etc. It’s better to back up rather than feeling sorry later.

WordPress and Hostgator are meant to give conveniences to their users. Therefore backing up is not difficult at all. For your information, blog is formed by 2 things; one is database, where all your posts, comments and etc are stored. The other is the theme and image files where you do your user interface customizations. With this we can do 2 kind of back up: – 1) Post & contents back up, 2) Blog complete back up.

Post and Content Back Up

This is the back up where you download all your posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories and tags. This back up will be quick and simple. Perhaps this back up is suitable for those who want to redesign the whole blog or move the contents to another place where graphic customizations is no longer needed..

1. To do it is very simple. First log in to your blog admin area, (it depends on which version of WordPress you are using as there are active upgrading recently from version 2.6 series to version 2.7, the interface will be a bit different however the concept remains the same)
   • if your blog version is 2.7, you will see a sidebar at your left hand side upon your log in. Navigate to Tools, then Export.
   • If you blog version is older than 2.7, then your blog navigation will be slightly different where the navigation bar is on top of the dashboard. Go to Manage, then Export.
2. There are clear explanations on the export function. It is your options to choose which author’s post to export. Since we are doing blog back up here I will download all the post. Click the “Download Export File” and a window pop up to store a XML file. Store it in a secured place and that file is your content back up file. Once you have saved it, you can import the file again to any WordPress blog you want.
3. It is worth nothing that downloading the XML file does not back up your image files. If you need to download those images you will need to use a FTP connecting to your image folder and download them.

This back up is quick and is meant to save the words. If you need to save the whole blog, including the appearance then you will need:-

Blog Complete Back Up

To have you blog completely backed up you need to do 2 things, one is to download all the files from your blog directory, two will be downloading you database.

1. First connect to your blog directory using FTP software and then download all the files under your blog directory. Based on the previous example, my blog directory is at reviewhostgator.org/blog. So I will download the whole “blog” folder from the web hosting to my computer. With that you have downloaded all your image files and customized themes.
2. Then you will need to download your database now. Log into your Hostgator cPanel and look for the category “Files”. There is a “Backups” under the category. This is where you save your database. In fact there is where you do your Hostgator hosting account back up too.
3. You will see a list of available MySQL database there. (Do you know which database is associated with your Blog?)
   
   • If yes, what you need to do is to right click on the link and save target/link as into you computer.
   • If no, you can either refer back to your blog installation summary (page shown when you first install the blog) or you can look for a file with name “wp-config.php” under your blog directory (the folder which you have just downloaded just now). Open it and look for “MySQL database username” and you will find your database name there. Then go back to cPanel and download the database.
4. Done. You have completely back up your blog now. It may sound messy but after a few time of practice you will do it hands down.

If you are aware enough you may be questioning why I need to download the whole blog directory but not just the XML file and the image folders to do the full back up. Yes that will save time however my experience tells me that backing up this way will cause some problems when restore it. The paddling or margin and some customization will be run out of place. Unless you have no customizations at all with your theme otherwise it is better to save everything down. After all it is just a 10 minutes work.

1. Is Hostgator Any Good To Bloggers? says:

   August 5, 2009 at 7:54 am

   [...] How to back up your blog from Hostgator [...]
2. gareth says:

   August 14, 2009 at 12:44 pm

   yeah great – so what about restoring it