To completely backup your Wordpress website/blog, you need to back up
- the database tables that contain your posts, the content of your pages, the comments, …
- the files that the wordpress site needs, like template files, images, galleries, …
1. Backup your Wordpress database,
I use the the plugin WP-DB-Backup (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-db-backup/)
Use the instructions to install the plugin.
Once installed, click Tools > Backup.
The core table are backed up by default, but you can choose to backup additional tables as well. Be sure to exclude spam comments and post revisions, they take up a lot of space and are not nessecary to backup!
Choose a backup option (avoid save to server, choose download to computer or email) and click Backup now!
Save the backup file on your harddisk. It is recommended you keep at least 3 files (and delete the older backups).
You can schedule your next backups by making your options and click Schedule Backup.
2. To backup your Wordpress files, use FTP (see FTP tutorial)
Download the contents of the wp-content folder.
Download all the plugins. You need to this only once and only download again when you install a new plugin.
In the themes folder you only need to download the folder with the theme that you are using. These are your templates files that “style” your blog. You only need to download it once.
The uploads folder is the folder that contains all your images and media that you add to your posts. You need to download the entire folder the first time. After that I recommend you only download the folder of the current month. (you need to make sure in the settings that the media are stored in monthly folders).
That’s it! Now my database table and the files are backed up weekly!