Always backup your wordpress database.
If you don’t backup your wordpress blog and your database becomes corrupted or your server crashes you can say bye bye to most of your blog posts.
One day while trying to modify my blog I misconfigured some features and accidently deleted the wordpress database. Read about it here I Messed Up Real Bad.
The manual way:
– Go to your WordPress Dashbord.
– Click on Manage
– Click on Export
– Follow the instructions to download an XML file which will contain your posts, comments, custom fields and categories. It is possible to select other tables to backup. You can then reimport this file to restore your blog database when needed.
How to backup wordpress the easy way?
Simply use a a wordpress backup plugin.
I am using on this blog a plugin that does a wordpress database backup.
This plugin gives two choices either it does a backup to your server in a directory /wp-content/backup-*/ for you to download later. You may have to set permissions the permissions of this directory to 777.
Or the plugin can email the backup to an address that you specify. It is good practice to check the zip file to make sure that the database was actualy backed up and the file is not corrupted. When the database file is emailed to you the file is deleted from the server.