Thesis styles and skins by Philip Barron

We begin today’s sermon with a word from Bert Mahoney, aka Berchman, WordPress developer/designer and member of the Thesis cognoscenti:

Bert is being rather blunt. He’s allowed, because he’s right. A backup strategy can spell the difference between success and failure in your web ventures. It can turn data loss disaster into momentary inconvenience. And yet, the number of people who cannot be bothered to back up their web installations – people, mind you, who have pinned their identities, hobbies, and livelihoods to their websites – is so high as to astonish.

The brief for backing up

There are many variables involved in installation and configuration – obscure server settings, potential plugin conflicts, customizations to style or function – that it’s impossible to anticipate everything that might go awry during an upgrade to a site. These are not reasons to be afraid; rather, they should prompt us to prepare. A complete backup strategy allows users to proceed with upgrades without fear.

There are some Thesis users who believe that dealing with unexpected results of an upgrade is as easy as switching back to a previous version of the theme. This is not the case, because Thesis is not your grandfather’s WordPress theme. The dynamic nature of Thesis and its relationship with the site database means that ‘rolling back’ to a previous version can be problematic: the result can be multiple and conflicting sets of settings in the database. Customizations be confused or lost. I’ve seen it often enough, and it’s a shame: a prudent backup would have spared these folks a great deal of angst.

Let’s put it this way: The makers of WordPress itself advise you to backup before starting its famed and usually smooth automatic upgrade. Are you smarter than the makers of WordPress? With due respect, I think the answer is ‘probably not.’

No one is (or should be) more responsible for the safekeeping of your site and its content than you, the site owner. So: let’s talk about being responsible.

What to backup

Many site owners believe that backing up consists solely of downloading web files to their local computer. Your site’s files are important, but they are only half the story. Think of your web installation – your WordPress files and folders, your Thesis files and folders, your various plugins and fonts and scripts – as the corpus of your site, its physical body. There’s much more to your website than that. There is also the database, the soul of your site: every post, every comment and link and custom field, each and every setting. Web files and database, and each are crucial. Without files, the database is a mere airy ghost, ineffectual, insubstantial. Without the database, your web files make up an inert thing at best…or at worst, a shambling, soulless creature mindlessly repeating a single word: Braaains…braaains…

No backup can be considered complete unless it involves both database and web files.

Example: How ThesisLab backs up

This site resides on a shared hosting account at the excellent Steadfast Networks, which provides me with a control panel called H-Sphere. With this tool, I can easily initiate a backup of both my site’s web files (called a domain by H-Sphere) and its database. Once the backup process is complete, I download the files to my local computer. I keep the set of two files together – domain and database – for any given backup date. I back up twice a week – and before any major upgrade – and I retain at least three weeks’ worth of backups. Additionally, I keep my backups in two different locations: on my local computer and on an online storage service (an Amazon S3 account). If the need for restoring my site through backup arises, H-Sphere provides an easy

So: I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about upgrades, because I know I really can ‘roll back’ to a previous state of the site at any time.

Backing up with cPanel

It is beyond the scope of this blog post to cover every kind of backup approach possible. However, I will spend time on backing up via the popular administration tool cPanel.

You start by opening the Backup Wizard, where you are given the choice of performing a backup or a restore.

Choose Backup. You’ll then see several different kinds of backup which you can perform.

Full backup (on the left) backs up all files and configurations in your site. It’s great to have if you want to move your site from one host to another (assuming that your new host also uses cPanel), but know that you cannot restore a full backup yourself. Only your webhost can restore your site using a full backup file.

For regular backup purposes, our topic of today, the following two options (on the right) are best:

Home directory, which contains such folders as public_ftp, public_html (which contains all of your web files, including WordPress and Thesis), mail, and others. These are your site’s web files.

MySQL databases, which is where all of your WordPress settings (including all posts, comments, categories, tags, custom fields, etc) and Thesis option panel settings are stored. This is your site’s database.

Clicking home directory will take you to a page where you can begin the download of your home directory to your local computer. Clicking MySQL databases will take you to a list of all your website databases. Both your home directory and your site’s database will be compressed before bring downloaded; even so, home directories can take a while to download. Do not leave your backups on your server.

Other backup notes

I have never backed up in the GoDaddy hosting environment. GoDaddy users should browse this collection of articles on backing up their sites. It’s good advice in general to search your host’s help files or knowledgebase to learn how to use the particular tools the host makes available to its clients.

Some users may be interested in the VaultPress backup service made availavle by Automattic, makers of WordPress.

If your hosting account provides you with phpMyAdmin and you’re familiar with its use, backing up and restoring the database at least is fairly straightforward. You’ll still need to find a way to back up your web files, however.

If your host doesn’t provide you with tools to back up either your web files or your database, it is well past time for you to find a new host.

In conclusion

I hope you away from this post not intimidated by things that can go wrong with an upgrade, but rather that you leave feeling empowered to protect the work that you’ve put into your online efforts. It’s your responsibility, after all.

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