Data Backup Digest

Backing up the data stored on your computer is just one step to having a complete back up system in place. You might also want to perhaps consider your online life and the data that you’re storing or writing up there. Many people invest a lot of time and effort in to writing their own personal blog, but what would happen if one day it just disappeared or the account is compromised. It isn’t wise to just rely on the blogging service to store your data forever. You need to take it in to your own hands if you value your data.

This article will explore various methods for backing up your WordPress and Tumblr blogs. Other platforms are available, but these two services are perhaps the most popular.

WordPress

There are various third party services out there that will back up your WordPress blog for a price. These are available as plugins and can be downloaded and installed through your control panel. WordPress does offer a free service that will let you download your database, but this is far from how comprehensive you’ll need it to be.

One such service is called VaultPress, created by Automattic (the company who produce WordPress, so you can expect this tool to be quite reliable). This backs up everything in real time and tracks every change, whether it is a new post or a new comment. One great thing about VaultPress is that it will even track changes that you make via FTP, meaning that you don’t have to edit everything through the dashboard for data to be saved.

Another service you might consider is blogVault, which offers varying pricing levels depending on how many blogs you run. It will keep a backup of everything from the last 30 days and makes it easy to restore from a backup, if necessary. A final service to consider is WP-Monitor, which takes a daily backup and stores it using Amazon S3.

These are some of the backup tools available for WordPress, but there are many more. It’s worth investigating them all and seeing which offer the features you need and within a reasonable price range.

Tumblr

Tumblr’s backing up ability is not as comprehensive as WordPress’, but it is definitely still possible.

One online service you can use is Tumblelog. On this page you enter the URL of your blog and specify the number and type of posts that you want to be backed up. It’ll then generate a HTML page, of which you can save to your system. The problem with this is that it is very simple and requires you to manually perform the backup each time.

If you’re on a Mac then you could use the official Tumblr backup app (no Windows version is available, sadly). This will output everything in a minimum style. Again, the backup has to be run manually, but it will at least only redownload image and audio files if they don’t already exist on the system. Text posts will be downloaded in full every time.