On November 11th McColo was turned off for hosting many spam, child porn, and malware sites (article at WashingtonPost.com). Although a small percentage, there were legitimates sites hosted there. 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 right now, they’re in a world of hurt.

But by taking action now and ensuring you have automated backup to internet for your WordPress sites you are protecting yourself. We worked out a simple five step process of automating your WordPress backups that anyone can use.

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. There is the hard way (manually with CRON) or the easy way (google and download WP-DB-Backup and WP-Cron) to automate the process. Activate both plugins in your WordPress plugin management page after you’ve downloaded, upzipped, and uploaded them to your site. A variety of plugins are included with WP-Cron. Just activate the ones called WP-Cron and WP-DB-Backup.

C. Click the “Manage” tab in WordPress now that the plugins are activated. You’ll see a menu item called “Backup”. This is the one you want. Manual backups have various settings available. Skip that and go to the section titled “Scheduled Backup” (at the bottom). You need to make sure to enable WP-Cron (if it’s visible, it’s enabled). In the settings for this section, set the schedule to “Daily” (or whatever timeframe is appropriate for your site). Use the address you decided to use where it says “Email backup to:”. The option to include noncore WordPress tables is the final step. We think the safe choice is to back them all up. The plugin’s default is to backup all native WordPress tables. Click Submit after you’ve selected any other tables.

D. Now the “Iron Clad” part. Grab yourself a copy of OPENRSM CloudBackup. It’s reliable, secure, and most flexible backup to internet product we’ve tried. It’s very simple to setup no matter if your a MAC, Windows, or Linux user. Make sure to select the options for backing up your email folders (and anything else you need to backup). Then set the schedule (we backup daily).

E. All done! 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 email account and see the backup arrive. 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 host should go down? Recovery is easy and fast, and your not suffering like the lost souls that were hosting their legitimate sites at McColo.