Over the years I have slowly found WordPress the ultimate content management system for not only blogs but a number for of websites that I’ve developed.  However, until recently I didn’t have an ideal back up solution. 

Running a content network, the most important element to my business and sites is content, more specifically the words.  Wordpress stores the words (and links to other media etc) in a database file and while I’ve found it easy to back up the pictures and other other media, backing up the MySQL database has been my biggest problem.

Until a few weeks ago I was occasionally making the odd MySQL backup.  This ’solution’ worked in as much as I ended up with a database but in the sprit of computer science I wanted to automate the manual process.

Enter WP-DBManager, a lovely WordPress plugin that will repair, optimize and backup your database.

  WP-DBManager 2.31 (29.9 KiB, 37 hits)

This plugin allows you to schedule your database backup to run automatically.  The file is the dumped into your WordPress directory for you use, but more importantly, the plugin will sent a copy of the backup in an email as an attachment.

This is the secret sauce of my backup solution, using Google Mail to store my backup files.  It is all good and great to keep the files on the local disk but that uses up scarce disk space (I run a hosting company, I know that there is no such thing as ‘unlimited disk-space’) and what if the disk was to fail?

In my solution, I keep five days of backups on the local disk and intend to keep a year’s worth of backups on Google.  Why Google?  Well right now, Google is offing near to 7GB of disk-space free of charge for email storage and Google has a relatively good history of not losing email data.

When my backups hit Google, they are ‘labeled’ based on which blog they came from and archived using a filter.

With this set up, I can now back up the database of my sites as often as I like - right now, I’m backing up every eight hours.  If I were really paranoid about data loss, I could set Google to forward email messages to the likes of Yahoo! Mail and repeat.

Restoring a backup is dead easy too.  Using the plugin, I can select a database on the local disk and back up from that or upload an archived backup from Google.

That is my slightly paranoid back up procedure for my WordPress MySQL databases.  How do you go about backing up your databases?