Eugene at #WPUGL recently gave a talk to a group of WordPress users on the importance and ease of backing-up your WordPress site. Indeed, when weighing up the value of the effort versus the time and difficulty, it is a no-brainer: taking less than 30 seconds when you have just posted something, why not?
As usual, I had my input. Carrying out a XML backup is easy and captures all your written work, settings, etc. But what of your site images?
Images are held within the /wp-content folder – you can see and work on this folder only if you have FTP access to the server. Otherwise you are reliant on your hosting service to perform this backup. An image backup is carried out by copying this folder to your storage, simple enough, though there are specialised plugins available also.
Here’s a question: do you not keep all your (original) images anyway?
If you keep all your blog pictures in a single folder on your computer say, or better, duplicated across onto a USB or CD/DVD, your know you always have a current backup of that image folder.
An aside, if you look in the /wp-content/images folder you will find lots of images you didn’t put there – closer inspection shows they are re-sized versions of your originals. WordPress creates these automatically when you upload them, and will do so again if you have restore the original images.
One of the group said their backup was huge, in the order of GBs, and taking ages to back up. Almost certainly this was all images. These automatically created images are all low resolution and are small files. True, if you have many ages they add up, but the problem is likely to lie in the size of the uploaded images – are you uploading pictures directly from a camera? Nowadays these can easily be 2MB per image, far too large for web work. If you want to retain copyright control over your images, you might like to give this particular thought.
However, again, if you have copies of the originals, why download them again?
Exploring these things in more depth is beyond the scope of this article, and something kept for our specialised training sessions. All of the WordPress sites we manage have FTP access, giving us at least, backup and repair facilities as well as the ability to carry out major customisations.
We provide WordPress solutions via NaturallyWordpess.co.uk