How many times have you failed to back-up your work, project etc only to realise that you have lost many hours of valuable work through the loss of data! I have been there and it makes my stomach churn. It is best practice to always back up your work. Nowadays, you pretty much back-up your data in a variety of ways: On a disk, Off site, via encrypted internet connection etc. A number of companies offer off-site data backup for really great prices. I should provide a review of these services at a later date. The bottom line is: Who will trust with your data?

How I backup WordPress projects:

Over the years, I have used a range of WordPress plugin solutions to back-up my blogs. If you are hosting your own blog/website, then it is best practice to make sure your databases structures and file systems are backed up regularly: at least weekly. If your blog is hosted by say Blogger or other Software as a service (SaaS) companies then, they are usually responsible for safeguarding your data.

This post is simply to highlight the importance of backing-up databases and also to highlight some of the WordPress plugin, I have found very useful over the years:

1. WP-google-drive by Malarvizhi Krishnan of Securenext Softwares WP  is great for making backups of your WordPress files and Mysql DB to Google Drive

2. WP-DB-Backup by Austin Matzko is another very good backup plugin that lets you backup your core WordPress database tables

3. Online Backup for WordPress by Jason Wood of BackupTechnology is one I discovered recently that is really powerful. It does everything including the option to encrypt your data. It provides protection for WordPress sites and their data. I like it.

There are many more but the key is to make sure your data is backed-up; preferably off-site and with someone you can trust with your valuable data.