If you search the WordPress plugin repository for “backup”, you’ll get—as of today—195 results. I wrote about two of those plugins, WordPress Database Backup and WordPress Backup by BTE, just about a year ago, and installed them on all 8 of my own WP sites, as well as insisting that my clients use WP-DB-Backup at minimum.

Both of those plugins back up different parts of a WordPress installation and then either save it there on the server or e-mail it to the admin. I get a lot of e-mails with database backups, as you can imagine. These aren’t large files, and it’s not too time-consuming to save them with other client files and let them get backed up as part of my regular backup routine.

But the BTE plugin backs up your uploads, plugins, and themes directories. And those can start to get pretty large after a while. Not large in absolute terms of how much room I have on my hard drive or backup drives, but large in terms of what it’s convenient to receive by e-mail, especially multiplied by eight or more. And then there’s the fact that the mail server for Author-izer.com, my primary business website, absolutely WILL NOT accept the plugins backup file, even though it’s a ZIP. It believes that file is full of malicious code out to attack me, and refuses it. (Ta ever so, mailer-daemon.) And then there’s the lack of versioning, because each week’s backups of those directories has the same name. These are minor annoyances, but real.

Now there’s a new plugin that combines the functions of these two stalwarts, with a few extras besides: Automatic WordPress Backup, sponsored by Melvin Ram’s Web Design Company, developed by Dan Coulter.

AWB lets you schedule daily, weekly, or monthly backups of your database, your wp-config.php file, your wp-content folder (themes, plugins, and uploads), and even your .htaccess file. Instead of e-mailing them to you, it uploads them to Amazon S3.

S3 stands for “Simple Storage Service.” It’s not actually quite as simple as all that, but the idea is that you only pay for as much storage and bandwidth as you actually use. Since a typical WordPress installation—even with a lot of plugins and uploads—isn’t very large, backing up via S3 shouldn’t cost more than a few cents each month.

Before you install the plugin, go to Amazon S3 and sign up for an account if you don’t have one already. (Signing up is free.) Once you get that confirmed, go to “Security Credentials” under the “Your Account” tab to get the information you’ll need to configure the plugin.

Then log into your WordPress dashboard and install the plugin normally. There’s a handy YouTube video that walks you through installation over on the AWB website. This is a nice touch. I just wish Amazon had done the same for S3! Once you activate AWB, you’ll be prompted to configure the settings. If you need to find them later, they have their own options submenu at the foot of the right sidebar.

Fill in your AWS Access Key and Secret Key, create an S3 “bucket” (the Ur-Guru was a bit disparaging about that term) to store your backup in, and decide what you want to back up, how often, and when to get rid of old backups.

I like both the option to automatically delete old backups and the option to make backups only once a month. There are sites that I don’t update any more often than that, even though I know I should.

When I first installed AWB on the test blog over at the Podcast Asylum, it didn’t seem to work. After you hit “Save Changes and Back Up Now,” you see a message telling you that there will be a link to download your most recent backup when you come back to that page—but there was never any link.

That was when I realized I didn’t know how to see what was on my Amazon S3 server. Amazon’s own site wasn’t too helpful; their AWS Management Console doesn’t work with S3 yet. Fortunately, there are plenty of other tools to let you get access to your S3 account. I picked S3Fox, a plugin for the Firefox web browser. Once I’d installed that, I was able to confirm that while my “testblog” bucket had been created, there was nothing in it.

Yet when I installed Automatic WordPress Backup here on the FileSlinger Backup Blog, it worked just fine. Was this a hosting issue, I wondered? (The Podcast Asylum site is on Dreamhost and the Backup Blog is on GoDaddy—and I don’t actually recommend either of them for WordPress hosting these days.) I got in touch with Melvin Ram, who walked me through installing the development version of the plugin, due for release next week sometime.

That fixed the problem: after clicking “Save Changes and Back Up Now,” I saw the following message:

That “Restore from a backup” tab is new in the development version; in the current version, 1.0.2, you have to download the backup and restore it manually. Not quite all the bugs are out of the restore process yet, though. I double-checked in S3Fox, and sure enough, the ZIP file was there.

I did notice, however, that while the ZIP file contained my wp-config.php file, my .htaccess file, and my wp-content folder, it was missing my WordPress database. (So was the one from fileslinger.com.) So I might want to wait through a few more development versions before I completely replace WP-DB-Backup with Automatic WordPress Backup.

Nevertheless, I think WDC has made a great start with this plugin, and that it’s going to be extremely useful once they’ve got the bugs out.

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?)