WordPress Backups, circa 2007: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 01-26-07

This week we’re moving from Blogger backups to WordPress backups. I have two WordPress blogs, though I don’t post very regularly to them. (I really should do something about that, but those pesky clients keep interfering.) I love WordPress. It’s less user-friendly than Blogger, but it also does endless things Blogger doesn’t. The Ur-Guru even trained it to provide dynamic content for his new personal website.

Unlike Blogger, WordPress stores all your blog entries in an SQL database. In the old days of WordPress 1.whatever, that meant backing up via something like PHPMyAdmin, through my web host’s control panel. It was pretty geeky, but at least it was possible, and I talked about it in my “Backups for the WordPress-Obsessed” article on October 7, 2005.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, a clever fellow named Scott Merrill had created a WordPress Database Backup plugin to save people like me from having to cope with PHPMyAdmin. That plugin now comes bundled with WordPress 2.0.whatever. If your web host hasn’t upgraded to WordPress 2.0 yet—shame on them! Seriously, you should download the plugin and install it yourself. (That means you copy the file(s) into the wp-content/plugins directory.)

Once you’re sure you have the WordPress Database Backup plugin installed, login to your blog dashboard, select the “Plugins” tab, and activate the backup plugin. Then click the “Manage” tab. Voila! A “Backup” tab appears on the sub-menu. This shows you just what gets saved in your backup, which is pretty much everything. You can elect to add things like your PodPress download statistics to the backup.

There’s a very funny step-by-step Flash video tutorial showing you how to do this at Tubetorial.

Even better, you can automate your WordPress backups by using another of Scott Merrill’s plugins, WP-Cron. “Cron” is short for “crontab,” a Unix (and now Linux) command for executing programs at set intervals. (The name derives from Greek *chronos*, meaning “time.”) You can get the plugin at Skippy.Net.

If you install the WP-Cron plugin, the Backup management tab will give you the option to back up your database automatically every day and e-mail it to you. I learned about this from Tip Vista and started doing it immediately.

Remember to send the backup file to an account which is not hosted on the same server as the blog! The database for my Authorized Articles blog is only about 150K, so it’s a manageable attachment. If you have a large blog, you’ll want to send the backup to an account that handles large attachments, like Gmail.

For those on the cutting edge, WordPress 2.1 has just been released. (I know because the Ur-Guru just installed it for himself.) It no longer comes bundled with the WordPress Database Backup plugin, though it has a built-in cron function. You can download the newest version of the WP backup plugin from Il Filosofo. (Scott Merrill is no longer developing it, having moved on to bigger and better things.)

I have to admit that it looks like I’d still need to go in to PHPMyAdmin in order to restore my WordPress database if I lost it, but that doesn’t leave me any worse off than I was with WordPress 1.5.

Now, I know I have some TypePad users among my readers, and if one of them would like to write a guest column about backing up TypePad blogs, it would be welcome.

Please feel free to send me suggestions for future articles.

Blogger Backup: The FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 01-19-07

We return at last to our regularly scheduled program: the series of articles about backing up your website(s).

These days, even people who don’t have regular websites have blogs. (My e-zine readers may be the exception.) One reason for this is that you can set up a blog in five minutes, for free, at Blogger.com. And that’s exactly what I did when I realized that a blog would be the perfect way to put the back issues of this e-zine online.

In some ways, I might have done better to wait. Blogger is very easy to use, but it has some limitations. The new Blogger Beta adds a number of functions, but also a number of hassles. I’ve had trouble publishing for the last two weeks, getting no end of FTP errors with no apparent cause. (This may have something to do with the fact that the new Blogger is designed to work best for people who use the Blogspot hosting service.)

Things seem to be working again, and I’ve managed to give the blog a facelift and some added usability, but the hassle definitely brought home to me the importance of backing up my blog.

Most of the posts on the FileSlinger™ Backup Blog are “reprints” of my e-zine, and I compose them in Microsoft Word. So I have both my original Word doc and the e-mail version sent out to the list as backups, and those get backed up with everything else on my drive. I could possibly survive without a backup of the blog per se.

The idea behind blogs, however, is to write spontaneously and directly into the blog, whenever you discover or think of something worth blogging about. That means that most users of Blogger don’t have any other copies of their blog posts.

For reasons unknown to me, Blogger does not provide any kind of export function (unlike the vastly superior WordPress, which I use for my Author-ized Articles blog, and to which I will almost certainly switch the Backup Blog as soon as I have time). I’d hoped that along with its other new functions, the new Blogger Beta would include backup, but not so.

Blogger Help does provide instructions on how to back up your entire blog, but their solution is kind of strange. To make a backup, you have to replace your template (the thing that tells the system what the blog looks like) with the code they provide. This results in publishing your entire blog on a single page. (There are more than 200 posts on my blog, most of them upwards of 800 words in length. That’s a very long page. And I’m not a prolific blogger.) To make a backup, you then save the web page from your browser.

My response when I saw this was “You’ve got to be joking.”

Because I do publish my blog by FTP to my own web server, all the archive files are actually up there anyway, handily divided into different folders by year and by month, with an individual page for each posting. I can just copy those files, along with the rest of my website, onto my local disk, and have them backed up with everything else. They also get included in any web backups I make from the control panel.

For those using the Blogspot hosting option, though (which seems to be most Blogger users), that’s not an option. Hence the rather crude workaround that the Blogger team recommends.

A few enterprising souls have created products designed to make it easier to back up your blog. CodePlex Blogger Backup is an alpha release, which means you have to expect bugs and other problems. I got an unhandled exception error the first time, but after that it worked just fine, and saved the posts as individual XML files in a folder, very quickly.

Lab Asprise’s Blog Collector is another option. It works with MSN, Blogspot, and other blogs. The only problem is that the Blogger Beta puts out a very strange, completely invalid RSS feed (or it does for my blog, anyway), and a valid Atom feed. Neither appeared to work, but then, my WordPress blog didn’t either. I’m not sure what’s up with that. The Lite version is free, so you can try it, but for obvious reasons I can’t recommend it myself.

Lifehacker recommended using a site copier like HTTrack (Windows) or WebGrabber (Mac) to back up a Blogger blog. Both the CodePlex and the Asprise products are Windows only, so if you’re a Mac user, that may be your only alternative to the one-page backup option suggested by Blogger Help.

And if you don’t have a blog yet, but are thinking of starting one, my advice is to avoid Blogger and go with WordPress—and not just because it’s easier to back up.

WhatIs.com Editor's Award

Techtarget's WhatIs.com has just selected the FileSlinger™ Backup Blog for an Editor's Award.

I blush to admit I hadn't heard of WhatIs.com before. I even wondered whether this might be a new improved form of spam. (The massive number of spam "subscriptions" to the Backup Reminder e-zine has left me particularly jaundiced.) But it's quite genuine. WhatIs.com turns out to be an IT encyclopedia, where you can look up definitions for computer jargon.

As a columnist more than a blogger, I never expected to get a blog award, so I think it's pretty cool. Of course, it's not like there's a lot of competition in terms of backup and recovery blogs.

The Reader Response Issue: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 01-12-07

Last week’s backup reminder prompted some reader responses, which I thought I’d share with you this week.

The first was from Loyal Reader Mike Van Horn:

Great philosophical discussion! What medium do you use to record information to last for what period of time?

Day, week, month, year
10 years,
100
1,000
10,000
1 million years

We send data etched on gold plates along with a space ship that is headed on a long slow journey beyond our own solar system. If found, may be a million years from now.

We read DNA preserved in tissues . . .
10 thousand year old Neanderthal
100 million year old dinosaur bone

We've got our Rosetta Stone (3k years?), Dead Sea Scrolls (2k + ), inscriptions inside the Pyramids (5k?)

In my closet, I have my handwritten notebooks going back into the early 1960s, easily and instantly readable.

But I also have 128k disks from mid-1980s that I have no way of reading.

The only reasonable way to back things up for extended periods of time:

• Durable media
• Varied forms
• Dispersed
• Hidden
• Remember where you hid them and how to use them

My response was as follows:

Gold is pretty durable, as long as humans can't get their hands on it. Ditto stone and so on. But unless it's kept away from people, the likelihood of re-use is a risk with things like gold, bronze, and marble. I used to be a classicist, and I know very well how many ancient monuments were melted down (if bronze) or hauled off (the facing on the Colosseum) or put into lime kilns (a lot of marble statuary). And then there are the ancient manuscripts which might still have been readable if they hadn't been deliberately or ignorantly destroyed. Even the conditions which have preserved papyri for millennia have been pretty hit-or-miss, and the written work that has survived is a tiny fraction of all that was created and even of all that was highly valued in its own time. Fire, flood, or mudslides could make those notebooks of yours difficult to read or destroy them altogether.

Then there's the issue of ease of creation. It's hard work carving out stone blocks, and it's expensive buying gold plates to inscribe. In Egypt, literacy was restricted to a very few people. Part of our problem with storing data now is that it's so much easier to create data.

But the copy-it-over method does work. Most of the ancient works that remain to us today exist in medieval manuscript form, copied over and over and over. We have scraps of Greek literature found on papyrus, but those, too, postdate the works' composition dates by decades or centuries. If people hadn't set out to make new copies as the old ones wore out, we'd hardly have anything.

Then the Ur-Guru got in on the game. Actually, he’d made one remark already about the ability of the Egyptians to preserve data, so I thought he’d want to read Mike’s comment and my response to it. And this is what he had to say:

Interesting discussion, indeed. :-)

Gold, stone, granite, magnetic pieces of circular discs, it all comes down to a decision where cost and effort are directly proportional to the value of the content.

If there is 400GB worth of valuable data to backup it's easy to copy it all to an external HD of the same size. Quick and efficient but less reliable than having the 400GB on good quality DVD's. The DVD's would almost certainly last a little longer than the HD. But the cost of the HD would be around $200 and the cost of 100 DVD's of good quality at around $1 each would be doulbe that. Add to that the time needed to play disc-jockey with 100 DVD's and that's a higher cost at more effort, depending on how valuable the content is. Doing both makes even more sense to get the best of both worlds, but again ups the cost.

How long do we want our content to be saved and recorded for history is another aspect. Does my source code matter 1000 years from now? Or even 100, or realistically speaking even 10 to 20 years from now. Very unlikely. I'd like my pictures to be recorded for the next eons but how realistic is that, to expect anyone to be interested in them so much further in time. On the other hand the Egyptians and pre-egyptian civilizations that have built some of the huge structures did not only build them to hold inscriptions of information but the structures and layout of the structures themselves are part of the message they have wanted to preserve for a long time, and successfully so. The value easily outweighs any of our digital pictures, source code, data so the effort was definitely proportional to the importance or value of the content there.

The biggest problem, though, is humans. As history has proven, all forms of records are evidently not appreciated or valued by the many generations that came after them. Robbing and pillaging, burning and destroying. Aliens that might at some point in the future find our gold plates might end up using them as coasters! :-)

And I would add to that the observation that while it’s easy enough to read handwritten notebooks from 40 years ago, there are actually very few people who can read ancient inscriptions and manuscripts. In general, the manuscripts are harder than the inscriptions. The Romans, at least, liked to make their inscriptions in neat, consistent capital letters. The Greeks on the whole did the same.

Those inscriptions bear very little resemblance to the scripts used by scribes on papyri, to the point where someone who can easily read the Oxford Classical Text version of an ancient work might have no better luck reading the oldest manuscript of the same work than someone who had never studied Greek or Latin. (Trust me: I am speaking from the experience of my former life, and it was a shock to me.) I can only assume this is just as true for Hebrew and Egyptian, and I know that cuneiform changed drastically over time and depending on the culture using it. (The cuneiform script was used to write many different languages.)

The fact that something exists, whether it’s an inscribed stone or a 128K floppy disk, doesn’t mean people can read it.

Fortunately, as Stefan said, we don’t actually need most of the data that we back up to either last for millennia or be usable that far in the future. We just need to preserve it long enough to guard against tax audits.

Preserving Your Memories: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 01-05-07

Happy New Year!

Rather than talk about New Year’s Resolutions, which always seem made to be broken, or at best to be temporary, I want to talk about preserving the past for the future.

I suppose you could say that it was seeing the search report that said someone had tried to find references to an “eternal network drive” on the Backup Blog that got me onto this subject. (And no, I haven’t forgotten about website backups.) I’m sure it was a typo for “external,” but if there were such a thing as an eternal hard drive, there would be a lot less need for backups!

Then I got a press release about NextoDI’s CF Ultra photo backup device, which the manufacturer claims is six times faster than its competitors and capable of backing up 1 GB of photos in less than a minute. The speed factor comes from bypassing the CPU during the copy process. This is all well and good, but personally I’d think twice before buying a hard drive from a company called “Next to Die.”

Less than an hour after reading Nexto’s press release, I found myself listening to an interview with HP Labs vice-president Howard Taub about, you guessed it, preserving photographs in the digital age. His recommendation for the best way to make sure the digital photos you’re taking of your children now will be around for future generations? Print them.

First Taub emphasized the fact that all hard drives crash. Indeed, by the law of averages my original external drive, Bluelight, is due to go any day now, as it’s been a good three years since I bought the thing and I do use it every day. That would make me a lot more nervous if I didn’t also have Teras and the D drive and the online backups. Then he talked about the difficulty in reading old media. “I have here an 8-inch floppy disk…” (Wow. I never knew 8-inch floppy disks existed.) Then there’s the uncertainty about the quality and durability of newer media. One reason the proponents of tape as a storage medium still favor it is that you can take a 30-year-old tape off the shelf and play it. (Fine, if you put it onto the shelf before it got tangled or broken.)

But this problem exists for all kinds of data, not just photographs. There’s nothing about photos and videos that makes them harder to preserve than any other digital information, though by their nature they are irreplaceable, particularly if they’re pictures of growing children. The solution to the problem of obsolete media is what it’s always been: copy the information onto new media as the older media become obsolete. As long as the older media hasn’t been damaged, the copies will be just as good as the originals. So put your floppy disks onto CD if you haven’t yet—and use good-quality, brand name CDs.

Back to printing. Taub’s reason for choosing print as the best method for preserving your digital photographs (video is obviously another matter) is his claim that a printed photo will last 100 years, at least if you use the right ink and the right paper.

Now, traditional, made-from-film photographs have already lasted longer than that, though not without some fading and cracking. But inkjet printing hasn’t been around for a hundred years. It hasn’t even been around for fifty years. And the new inks used in the new photo printers are even a few years old. So how do printer manufacturers (and HP is not the only one to make these claims) know that the prints will last that long?

Not that many of the people buying photo printers now are likely to be around to sue the printer manufacturers a hundred years from now if the photos prove less permanent than the kind made in a darkroom. Heck, the printer manufacturers might not even be around to sue. So it’s probably a safe claim to make, and there’s probably some reason for companies like HP and Epson to believe that these prints will last as long as the sepia-toned prints of my great-grandparents have.

By all means, print and distribute your favorite digital photos, and definitely use the brand-name ink and paper for the ones you want to last. But it still seems to me worth considering the source when evaluating the advice that print is the best way to preserve digital photos.

(You can find the complete December 29th interview with Howard Taub at www.ontherecordpodcast.com.)