While I’ve got a couple of guest posts promised (both on Mac backups), nothing has yet materialized, so I thought I’d take a closer look at some of the backup news that’s come up in the past week. I bookmark all those stories I find in Google Alerts or hear about from other sources, but I don’t always go back and investigate them further.

If you’re a non-WordPress blogger (heresy!), you’ll want to check out Allen Stern’s “Do You Backup [sic] Your Blog?” post in the InformationWeek Digital Life Weblog. Allen provides links to guides for backing up Drupal, Movable Type, and Blogger, as well as mentioning the WordPress DB-Backup plugin I’ve covered extensively here.

Actually, speaking of WordPress (as I do a lot these days), I went to my first WordPress Meetup in San Francisco last week—and we found ourselves talking about backup, and this blog, and the post on the WordPress Backup plugin by BTE, about which even the experts in the room had not heard. (Well, there are 4,000 registered WordPress plugins.) Everyone there but me was a Mac user, and nearly all of them had some kind of horror story to tell about fried hard drives. Whether or not Macs have superior operating systems, a hard drive is a hard drive, and anything that spins at high speed is at risk. (Like my CD/DVD drive, for instance, but let’s not talk about that.) I hope all their blogs are more backed up as a result of that discussion.

Anyway, back to the news. Peter Kent of the Northern Colorado Business Report is a geek in search of the perfect backup. (I know just how he feels.) Right now he’s using two online backup systems: SugarSync (about which I’m supposed to write, or get someone to write, eventually) and iDrive, in combination with a Rebit—though he’s not actually quite sure that he could restore from the Rebit. I’m glad to know Rebit is hanging in there, though I suspect that a product designed to work for the clueless user is always going to encounter problems with the power user’s modded machine. It’s always a challenge to design a drive-imaging product for Windows, because there are so many possible hardware variations. Macs are a far more controlled environment.

The Technically Personal blog has a list of “Top 10 Websites to Take Backup of Data for FREE!” (a title that says “Non-native speaker of English” to me). Among familiar sites like Mozy, iDrive, MyOtherDrive, and our friends at SpiderOak (featured in the December 12th Backup Reminder), TP lists the less familiar Adrive, SkyDrive (from Windows Live), Humyo, 123-drive, Drive Headquarters, and Orbitfiles. Technically Personal also has a post about free data recovery software for USB sticks, but I’m pretty sure DriveSavers would tell you not to use it.

Finally, I thought I’d see who was giving presentations about backup, so I hopped on over to SlideShare and did a search. I found 2577 presentations available for download. If you want a lesson in the basics of backups, there’s definitely one available for you. In fact, I could probably fill up the blog for weeks just by posting the slideshows, even if I leave out all the ones specific to enterprise environments.

Somehow, though, that feels like cheating. Still, I might pick out a few favorites. Come to think of it, I might see about sharing the presentations I did on backup for NYLF, way back when. They’re only slightly dated; all that’s really changed is the average size of a hard drive.

What never changes is the importance of backing up your data. So what are you waiting for?

Episode 8 of Plugins: the WordPress Plugins Podcast focuses on the WP-DB-Backup plugin I mentioned in the Backup Reminder for January 30th. Angelo Mandato mentions a few backup tips I left out—but doesn’t seem to know about the WordPress Backup plugin from BTE.

As I said a few months ago when I moved the Backup Blog from Blogger to WordPress, one of the things I like about WordPress is the ease with which you can back up your blog posts. For some years now, I’ve been using a plugin called WP-DB-Backup to back up my WordPress databases into compressed XML files and e-mail them to me. I then download the backup files to my hard drive, where they get backed up to several different places. For this blog, which has 378 posts at the time I write this, the entire database takes up less than 1 MB. I’m pretty sure that if those were all separate HTML pages, they’d be taking up a lot more space.

WP-DB-Backup labels each new backup file with the date, making it easy to keep several copies in the same directory if you have any reason to think you might want to go back to a previous version. (I can’t really think of one, myself, yet I do tend to let those copies pile up for a while before purging them.)

If you’re a blogging maniac, you can get hourly backups made. Weekly is often enough for me, though. I know that I publish something at least once a week, and more often now with the “Postalicious” plugin importing my backup bookmarks every couple of days.

There’s more to a WordPress site than just the database, however. Other elements include themes (the design), plugins (tools for added functionality, like SEO, video, or podcasting), and uploads (files you insert into your posts through WordPress’ upload function). While it’s possible to re-install plugins pretty easily from the WordPress dashboard (as long as you remember which ones they are), it can still be time-consuming. And you’d better remember which of thousands of free themes you’re using if you want to get that back. If you’re using a theme you paid for, you might have it stored on your hard drive already. (This is the case with the theme I created for the FileSlinger site.) But those uploads…Even if you have all the files you’ve uploaded somewhere else, putting them back into your posts would be a real pain.

Enter a second plugin to handle backing up these three folders: WordPress Backup by Blog Traffic Exchange. This plugin backs up your Themes, Plugins, and Uploads folders and e-mails them to you on a schedule of your choosing.

In case you’re wondering, the plugin finds the plugin, theme, and upload directories automatically, and creates one of its own for backups in the “wp-content” folder, so you don’t have to do much configuring. The .zip files that WordPress Backup sends can get pretty large—my “plugins” folder for this site is 5.5 MB—so you might want to download the backups manually rather than having them e-mailed to you. I’m not storing multiple copies of these: I overwrite the previous ones with the new ones.

I used to upload my images manually to an Images directory, but now that I’ve got WordPress Backup running, it’s encouraging me to use WP’s “uploads” function. Besides, being able to upload the images automatically makes creating a post faster and easier.

If you have a WordPress blog or website, there’s no excuse not to back it up. (And if you don’t—what are you waiting for?)