Back up your Back up’s Back up: Fundamental lessons in managing a website
Upload that, Update this, download that, edit this. Oh S@#$@# what did I just do? or Where did my work go?
This situation gets the best of us, but should never happen to you or your business. I recently had a similar experience where I updated a wordpress plugin for a site and forget to make a back up copy prior to the update. The damage wasn’t much, but currently is a pain in the ass, and worse going to take up time.
Luckily the gang from startup Twofold gave me a few valuable tips on prevention for future mistakes and how to make manual back ups for your site. There are automated ways to do this as well which I will write in another post.
Let’s get “Redundant” (Yes a Pun!)
1. First thing you need to do is get access to your FTP that your site is hosted on. Typically when you purchase your hosting plan the provider will email your server login details for your CPanel, FTP, etc.
In case you need to know. What is FTP?
For this example you will only need to focus on FTP login details. Once you have them you will need to download FTP software. I recommend Filezilla.
Time to connect
2. Install Filezilla and fire it up.
Now to hook up your account to Filezilla select the “Site Manager” icon (image below)
Next enter you FTP account details as instructed in the picture below.
Now that your details are entered and the connection to the server is made you should see your files on you server.
Copy the files you need to back up
3. To make it easy I will just show you how to back up your wordpress site data. This is ideal if you are managing a personal site that you change frequently or manage client websites and need to back up a site when making minor/major changes.
Find your public html folder. Open it. (Note it may not be exactly the same depending who is managing your site)
Select a local folder on your computer to make a copy of the wordpress site. I choose the desktop folder to use. Select wordpress and drag it to the desktop folder.
Now the downloads begins!!! I recommend placing one copy on your local drive and another on a cloud storage service such as Dropbox, Onedrive, or Spideroak.
For any questions just ping me on twitter or the comments below.
originally post on joneilerman.com
