It goes without saying that you need to back up your WordPress installation. If you’re anything like me, you’ve invested hundreds of hours writing, designing, and otherwise contributing to your WordPress site. It would be foolish to trust your web host to keep your data safe.

Fortunately, there are a lot of great tools available to make backing up your WordPress site more of a pleasure than a chore. I’ll describe a few of these below.

You’ll mainly need to backup your WordPress database and any extra tables created and used by your plugins. WordPress has a built-in tool called Export under the Tools menu in the Admin section that allows you to dump your WordPress core data (posts, pages, categories, etc) to an XML file that can then be imported into a new WordPress installation if you ever need to recreate your current site.

Here’s the official WordPress documentation on backing up your database.

Link: http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Backups

The single best database backup tool I’ve found is WP-DB-Backup by Austin Matzko. This tool has a number of options to back up your core WordPress database tables and any other tables you want. I use it for both my WordPress installations and it works great.

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-db-backup/

Backing up your actual WordPress files (not the database) is really easy. You can just use an ftp tool of some sort to grab all the files starting at the top level where you installed WordPress and getting everything under that too. If you have command line access to your site, it’s even easier. Just log in and go to the root of your WordPress install, tar and/or zip up the whole WordPress site into a file, and then just download that to a safe place. Restoring your site will then be as easy as uploading and untarring/unzipping your WordPress site and restoring the database using whatever tool you used to back it up. I’ve made copies of one of my WordPress installs for local tinkering or to create a new site based on an existing one and I can verify that this works well.

There are other things to say about this important topic. Hopefully I’ll return soon to add to this article.