Roland Rust runs http://wordpress.designpraxis.at and we are pleased to introduce him as our guest blogger today! In this post he discusses WordPress backups with one of his excellent plugins, "BackupWordPress". This plugin really makes it easy not only to backup your entire blog (including files) but also to restore it with the click of a button.

» A little about Roland

Roland’s website is dedicated to WordPress, WordPress plugin development, web development and open source software in general. He has been working as a self employed IT consultant since 2000 developing web based applications, multimedia datbases, multi-user portals and web 2.0 web-services.

» Intro

With a plugin like BackUpWordPress, doing backups has become an easy task. Both WordPress and BlogSecurity stress backups constantly and usually point it out as the first thing you should do when upgrading your WordPress installation or doing any significant changes.

Let’s say you’ve got a website running on WordPress 2.2.2 and are about to upgrade to WordPress version 2.3. How can you assure that your WordPress website will run flawlessly after upgrading?

» Step One

Download and install BackUpWordPress, if you run into troubles while getting it to work, find help at the support forum. Select the full backup option with includes SQL-dump (database backup), files and directories.

Download the newly created "full backup". If you want to verify your backup has been completed without errors, have a look at the backup log in AdvancedMode of BackUpWordPress: Click on the "view" link at the backup listed on the "Manage Backups" screen.

» Step Two

Let’s do a complete offline mirror of your WordPress website. Create an offline development environment, follow the instructions I give in this article. In short, you need to install WAMP5 or XAMPP (on Windows or Linux) or MAMP (on Macintosh). Unpack your backup archive and move the contents of the directory named "wordpress_files" into the webroot of your localhost.

Most Apache-MySQL-PHP development environment solutions like those mentioned above come with phpMyAdmin and other database management tools. You will need to create a database and a database user identical to those on your webserver. Alternatively you can change your offline wp-config file.

Import your wordpress.sql which still resides within your unpacked backup archive into MySQL. I recommend bigdump for this. Take your time for any tasks you perform with phpMyAdmin or bigdump. Read documentations first!

» Step Three

Congratulations! Now you have an identical version of your current WordPress website on your local machine. Before you proceed any further, use phpMyAdmin to execute the following SQL statements:

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = ‘http://localhost’ WHERE option_value = ‘[your_blog_url]’;

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = ‘http://localhost’ WHERE option_value LIKE ‘[your_wordpress_url]’;

Where you have to exchange [your_blog_url] and [your_wordpress_url] with the respective URLs from your WordPress website’s general options. Unless you do this, you’ll be redirected to your online version with every click on your offline version.

Deacivate all plugins which are not essential for your website to run before proceeding to step Four.

» Step Four

Download WordPress 2.3 (Currently release canditate is available), unpack and copy the files into your localhost’s webroot. Browse to http://localhost/wp-admin/upgrade.php and follow the instructions. Now you can browse through your WordPress website offline upgraded to version 2.3 and check for issues. Activate your plugins one by one and test your site thoroughly.

» Step Five

Be sure you have a complete backup of your blog and repeat step four with your production website online. Use a plugin like Demo Mode to prevent access to the site while upgrading. If your online WordPress installation resides in a seperate directory, I recommend creating an untouched online copy. If you screw up, you can simply rename this directory again.

You’re done!

» Notes

I know that these 5 Steps just roughly resamble one possible solution of how to do a failsafe upgrade of your blog. At least that’s the way I use to do it, which doesn’t mean I am never runn into trouble during the upgrade process. In fact with every release of WordPress I upgrade more than 20 different installations of WordPress, each hosted on a different webserver with different configurations. Therefore I am used to running into troubles.

Here are a few issues that I ran into along with solutions and workarounds :

Problem: The offline copy of your WordPress site on http://localhost gives an internal server error 500

Solution: Delete the .htaccess file of your offline version and set your permalinks to standard permalinks without URL rewriting. This doesn’t affect upgrade process on your online production site at all, since URL-rewriting works online with your current WordPress installation.

Problem: I get “Fatal error” messages on my offline copy of WordPress.

Workaround: deactivate some more plugins that might be the source of the problem. Especially plugins using the table post2cat like sideblog cause such errors. Remove respective template tags as well.

Problem: I still get Error messages all over my offline website.

Solution: Choose the default theme, to seperate issues caused by the WordPress 2.3 core upgrade from issues that might derrive from incompatibilities of you WordPress Theme with WordPress 2.3

Problem: I can’t seem to get an offline copy of my blog to work at all.

Solution: Try to find help at the official WordPress Support Forums.

Problem: Should I risk to upgrading my online WordPress installation without being able to test it offline first?

My Answer: No! Never! Try to get help with your offline install first. WordPress 2.2.2 is stable and there is no reason why you shouldn’d take your tie upgrading to 2.3