Backup Your WordPress Blog to Dropbox

Backup is one important task while considering the files we want for the future use. The same applies for the websites especially blogs that update regularly. You never know what catastrophic might happen to your blog, some times bad hosting problems, hackers or any some others. The best defend against all those problems is a good backup. Mostly hosting services backup your files and databases weekly or monthly , but its good to have a copy of the backup with yourself. The people who have access to the back end of the hosting especially Cpanel have backup option there, but what if you have access to only to your blog and your FTP space. Either you have to download all the files manually or use a WordPress plugin to download all the database and files. Now downloading all these manually is a sick job, mostly bandwidth wastage, time wastage etc. What if you can schedule a backup so that it backups all that files and databases to a remote location or any other file storage services like Dropbox. That is where a plugin called BackWPup comes in.

What is Dropbox?

Dropbox is a Web-based backup/file hosting service operated by Dropbox, Inc. that uses cloud computing to enable users to store and share files and folders with others across the Internet using file synchronization. Dropbox has both free and paid services. Free service provides 2GB of free online storage. For more information you may visit here.

How to backup?

First of all download the plugin from here or search from your blog plugin page and activate it.

Access the BackWPup plugin settings form the Tools panel and click Add New.

 

 

 

From the job settings page,

1. First is first, Give a name for the job.
2. Choose which type of job you want to do. Since we want to do a full site backup select “Database Backup” and “File Backup”.
3. By default, all database tables are selected, but if you want to exclude any of the table from the backup, tick those tables.
4. Next is File Backup. Just as above, by default all are selected, but if you want to exclude some files from the backup you may tack those files.
5. Backup to Dropbox. In order to backup to Dropbox, first you need to authenticate with the your Dropbox account with the blog. Click on authenticate, and it will take you to Dropbox website where it will ask your Dropbox account username and password. (If you have other paid services like Amazon S3, Rackspace cloud, you can use that.)
6. Job Schedule. Schedule at what time, date and month you want to backup. You can do this daily, weekly or even monthly.
7. Backup Prefix and File Format. Select the format you want the backup in.
8. If there occurred any error, it will report you by mail.

Click on save changes and your backup job is scheduled /done.

Check you Dropbox account for the backup.