Keeping regular backups of your WordPress blog can give you peace of mind, that should something go wrong, you won’t lose everything.

But keeping backups isn’t as hard as you might think, you can backup your entire blog including all of your uploaded files, themes, and all of your posts and comments, as well as your plugins by following these simple steps

Log into your WordPress Dashboard.

Go to Plugins -> Add New:

Now search for ‘BackUpWordPress’ and click on ‘Install’:

Once the plugin has finished installing, activate it.

Now that we have the plugin installed, let’s take a look at the options, and configure our backups.

Go to Tools->Backups:

Now click on ‘Settings’ and fill out the following fields:

1. What to back up – Both will back up your full database, all themes, plugins and uploaded files, Database only or Files only will backup your database or your blog files respectively.
2. Schedule – This is how often you want the backup to run. Choose from: Manually, Fortnightly, Weekly, Monthly, Hourly, Daily or Twice Daily.
3. Number of backups to store: This can be a maximum of 10 and a minimum of 1. Older backups will be automatically deleted leaving you with the maximum number you entered.
4. Email Notification: If you enter an email in this box you will automatically receive an email every time a successful backup is created. If your backup is under 10mb it will be attached to the email, otherwise the email will contain a link to download your backup.

Keeping regular backups is good practice and will give you something to fall back on should the worst happen.

If you ever lose your blog, you simply have to upload all of the files from your latest backup and apply the sql dump using mysqladmin.

If you have any other tips for keeping your blog backed up, let us know below.