By: Arunn Prasad

Why backup?

We are assured by our hosting companies of 99.9% uptime and weekly/hourly automatic backups of their servers and sometimes assured of data recovery as well. So why do I need to back up my news-portal one more time? While most responsible hosting companies do keep their promises, the delay and heartache is worth the seconds we spend to prevent it. Also it is not advisable to put all your eggs in one basket. There might be many reasons why a data loss could happen, but all we can do is to back-up our valuable data regularly. In this article we go through the simple and straight-forward way to backup any modern news-portal software and also instant backup methods for two popular open-source portal software; Wordpress (http://www.wordpress.org) and Joomla (http://www.joomla.org). Both are free and also available for instant install from most control panel software.

How often and what to back-up?

The simple answer would be, the same frequency you update the portal. It is highly recommended to backup your portal everytime BEFORE you try to upgrade/ install new extensions / modules / themes. If the installation goes bad, you will have the power to get back in time in your own hands. Basically you need to backup two things: 1. The files which consist of the software itself, the themes , plugins, add-on modules, images etc., and 2. The database which contains the articles, posts, comments, statistics etc.,

How to back-up?

While there are built-in one click solutions within the software to do the same, it might not work for everyone, every time. It is recommended to keep a manual backup for every three automatic backups. The industrial practice is even more rigid. The files are synced almost instantly in different physical server(s), while the database is synced into a slave database(s). With such a system, the chances of data loss are very minimal. Good it might sound, but it might not be affordable for everyone. We will first see the straight-forward methods to backup, while later check-out the easy options made available.

1) The File-System

It is the same as any folder in our computer, except that it resides in a remote server. By using a free FTP software such as WinSCP (http://winscp.net/), you can sync the entire portal (normally public_html) to your own computer. The first time might be a bit slow, depends on the size of your portal, but when you do it regularly, it will take little time and will serve as offline backup of your website. You could also zip it and save it on a flash-drive/ DVD, which will be part of your web-archive.

2) The Database

The database is the heart of your portal. Modern portal software store all articles, posts, comments, revisions, statistics in the database, and most of the time you are updating the database through the admin portal. The simplest way to back-up a MySQL database ( both WordPress and Joomla uses MySQL as its default, at the time of writing) is through a PhpMyAdmin web interface. But Don’t Panic, most of us would have it installed by default in your hosting control panels. When you have found that, half the work is done. Once you login with your MySQL username and password, (the same as used with your news-portal settings) you will be landing in a similar interface as below.

You might have only one or several databases installed, but select the one used for your news-portal from the left menu. For this illustration am selecting the database “news_portal”. The number in brackets denotes the number of tables contained in that database

Choose “Export” from the menu from the interface.

1. Remember to Check the Select All tables option

2. Keep the export format as SQL

3. Check the ADD DROP Table statement ( otherwise you must delete the table manually before you attempt restoring backup )

4. Make sure you have selected Data with the complete inserts option.

5. Check the Save as File option. If the database is huge, you also can check the zipped / gzipped options.

6. Now Click Go, and save the database dump in your computer.

Now we have backed up both the file-system and the database, we have a complete backup of the news-portal. Periodical archival of such backups in DVD, flash-media and online storage services will ensure that the data is always available for retrieval.

And the easy options?

Wordpress : This is designed to be as much user-friendly as possible, so backup is a one-click operation. From the admin panel dashboard you can find the export option in the Tools menu.

One click at that, and you get to download the wordpress created XML file, which can later be imported to any fresh installation of wordpress. However, this might take ridiculously long or fail in some webservers, depending on the size of the database and memory and burst limits available to you. If it works for you, be thankful and use it regularly. Thirdparty plugins such as WordpressBackup (www.wordpressbackup.com) offer free/premium backup services as well.

Joomla : Joomla doesn’t want to give an easy way out by itself, as the documentation recommends the method we have been explaining before. However you are not left alone. Third party extension developers such as Akeeba Backup (http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/access-a-security/backup/1606) have comeup with a click-and-save solution which also can be automated if you want that way.