The use of plugins such as the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin and the WordPress Database Backup plugin makes the upgrade of WordPress a fairly quick and easy process.  It is the ease of this process, which sometimes enables WordPress users to relax and forget that no matter how great the tools are that they are using, disaster can happen when least expected. Many online marketers have found over time that a backup of their website files is critical to the continuation of their business. While I personally have not had an upgrade go bad or had a web hosting service suffer a catastrophic event, there are enough stories out there where others have had these experiences.

If you have a business, and you depend on that business for income, it is worth protecting and taking the time to setup a disaster recovery plan for it. What would you do if the hosting service you work with suffered a catastrophic event and your website files were lost?  Would you be able to recover your website?  What about running an upgrade, in this case a WordPress upgrade and your site fails to come back up once it is done?  Would you be able to reconstruct your site?

Occasionally an upgrade problem could be related to a plugin that did not care for the upgrade, but there have been situations where an entire site has been taken down.  Upgrades are generally released for a reason.  In the case of the 2.8.6 release, a vulnerability that could be exploited by registered users is fixed.  Therefore, it is a good idea to upgrade in a timely manner when upgrades are released. It also pays to protect the site in advance before doing the upgrade.

Backing up a website is a relatively simple process.  Create a folder on your hard drive and use your FTP program to download your website files. Don’t forget to include the date of the backup in the folder name.  Once they are downloaded, they can be burnt to disk or copied to another location.

Another good plan is to take regular backups of your database files.  If you are using the WordPress Database Backup plugin, there is an option under Dashboard – Tools – Backup to schedule regular backups of your database and email the results to your email account.  If you have a GMail account with its ability to store unlimited files, simply email the backups there and you will always have a backup to fall back on.

Upgrades are not the only time you should be backing up your website.  As part of your disaster recovery plan, schedule regular backups of your website files, particularly if you will be making significant changes to the site.

To Your Success,

SherryD
http://www.wbobr.com

Update December 02, 2009:
Before you say this could never happen to you, realize it does happen, even to well established sites. Tonight I visited backflip.com. Their site has been down since October 13th. Here is what is posted currently on their site.

[ October 13, 2009 - 7:00pm PDT ]

A power outage at our hosting facility took out all of our servers for several hours starting around 7:00am PDT. Once the power came back on we began to bring the servers up remotely. Unfortunately, the database server is refusing to start up. Surely it’s nothing terminal but will require human intervention and there is no one available to head over to the colo facility at the moment. Please check our twitter microblog on the left for the latest updates.

# thank you for your continued patience – believe it or not recovery efforts are still continuing. we will have more info later this week. 1 day ago
# effort to recover the database continues 15 days ago
# update : restore from backups failed. remaining chance at recovery is to fix the existing database. work continues. 23 days ago

I haven’t had a lot of time to post lately because the company, where I work as a server tech, is in the process of moving to a new facility. This has required months of preparation to simply ensure that all systems could be safely moved and that a plan was in place to recover in case of an accident or the system failing to start up in the new location. Backups have played a key role in this project, as they do in the company’s overall disaster recovery plan.

As you can see from the experience of Backflip, disaster can strike at anytime, to anyone. I wish them every success in their recovery process.