On November 11th McColo was turned off for hosting many spam, child porn, and malware sites (article at WashingtonPost.com). More than a few legitimate sites were hosted there as well. And now they’re scrambling to rebuild their blogs, sites, and all their content somewhere else. the sad thing is how may legitimate sites using WordPress are affected and trying to rebuild without a good backup. So they’re having it rough right now.

You can take action now and have automatic backup to internet for your WordPress sites. We looked around and put together five simple steps that anyone with a WordPress site can use to ensure a frequent, secure, and safe backup.

Automated WordPress Backup to Internet

A. First off, choose the email address you want to use to receive the initial backups. Don’t use webmail for this. Use an account that you access with Outlook, Evolution, etc. And don’t use an address hosted where your WordPress site is.

B. You can automate the process with WP-DB-Backup and WP-Cron (google and download) or you can set up a CRON job manually (don’t do that). Get both plugins downloaded, unzipped, and loaded to your WordPress plugins folder and activate them in your WordPress plugin management page. A variety of plugins are included with WP-Cron. Just activate the ones called WP-Cron and WP-DB-Backup.

C. With all the plugins activated now, click the WordPress “Manage” tab. You’ll see a menu item called “Backup”. This is the desired one. Manual backups have various settings available. Skip that and go to the section titled “Scheduled Backup” (at the bottom). If you don’t see it, you don’t have WP-Cron enabled, so make sure it is. In the settings for this section, set the schedule to “Daily” (or whatever timeframe is appropriate for your site). Where it says “Email Backup To:” put in your email address (Step A). The option to include noncore WordPress tables is the final step. We think that backing them all up is the safe choice. The default is for the plugin to backup all native WordPress tables. After you’ve decided about the tables, if you have any others, hit “Submit”.

D. Now the Rock Solid part. Grab yourself a copy of OPENRSM CloudBackup. It’s cheap, easy, and the best backup to internet system we’ve tried. Setting it up for Windows, MAC, and Linux users is dead simple. Make sure the selection is made to backup your email folders. Now you should set the schedule, click “Daily”.

E. There you go, that’s it! Your WordPress SQL backups should be emailed to you and they’ll be using the backup to internet features of CloudBackup to make sure you don’t lose your site. Check the account and see the first backups happen. You can now quit worrying and let the plugins, your email account, and CloudBackup do all the work. Just make sure to delete older backups from your email occasionally and your work is done.

And if your server should crash? You’ve now enabled fast and easy recovery and your not having to sweat it out like those caught off guard when their host goes down.