i, prash

I have been using Backup My Blog for the past two weeks and I must say it has given me real peace of mind. As the name implies, it’s a simple service that connects to your MySQL installation and performs a daily backup of all your tables.

The installation does require that you have access to run scripts on your server and you can either supply them with an ftp user/password or just install a local config file. Then the client file is downloaded to your server and that’s it.

Status updates are sent to you by email or if you prefer you can receive it via RSS instead. If you want to recover your data, you can choose any date from the archive and either run another script or just download the entire SQL script to get back your data.

The service is a boon especially to people like me who host our blogs ourselves and where one power-surge or fried hard-disk can mean the loss of several posts depending on how often we rememebr to take a manual backup (once a year, in my case!). This is a good idea even if you host your blog elsewhere and the hosting company backs up your data, because one (not)fine day you could wake up to find your hosting company is gone.

The service is free during beta and gives you 10MB of space (enough for a few days worth of backups even for a fairly large blog) and deletes older backups as your quota fills up. Each day the backup feed brings up a neat report:

Tables backed up in the ‘wordpress’ database:

prash_amm: 10 of 10 rows.
prash_categories: 11 of 11 rows.
prash_comments: 86 of 86 rows.
prash_linkcategories: 2 of 2 rows.
prash_links: 7 of 7 rows.
prash_options: 86 of 86 rows.
prash_post2cat: 135 of 135 rows.
prash_postmeta: 23 of 23 rows.
prash_posts: 130 of 130 rows.
prash_usermeta: 20 of 20 rows.
prash_users: 4 of 4 rows.

You currently have 9 compressed blog backups, using 16.91% of your backup space (1.69 MB out of 10 MB).

I find I sleep better at night these days … err, nights.

blog, backupmyblog