This past Wednesday, when trying to get to the dashboard to work on my blog, I was surprised to see the WordPress 5-minute installation page instead. I then tried getting to the blog from my spots in the Commentators lists of fellow Alex Jeffreys students, but to no avail: For the fifth time, I had lost my blog!

Fortunately for me, this time I had a recent blog database backup, thanks to having installed the WP-DB-Backup plugin when I first (well, fourth) started blogging. I had chosen to receive the backup file weekly in my mailbox, so I had it handy for the job ahead. Now I just had to find out how to use it…

After doing some research in Google for ‘how to restore a WordPress database’, I concluded that the simplest set of instructions appeared to be in the WordPress Codex itself. Following the steps in the Using phpMyAdmin section of the document, I logged in phpMyAdmin through the Cpanel of my domain. Next, the codex instructs to “…select the database that you will be importing your data into.”

It took me a while to figure out how to identify which database to use since phpMyAdmin listed three different ones under my domain login username. Finally I realized that the backup file name that the plugin generates contains the database name. In my case, the file name was brighter_wrdp2_wp_20091229_243.sql, so I picked ‘wrdp2′ as the database to restore:

And that was the trickiest part of the process! The remaining six steps required three simple clicks of the mouse and in a few seconds I had my blog back.

What a difference from the four previous mishaps… Having that backup file was the key to an easy recovery of my blog, so many thanks to Austin Matzko for a most effective plugin!

After going through the WordPress documentation on how to backup the content of a blog, I decided to incorporate the WP-DB-Backup plugin, made available for free by Austin Matzko through his site, Il Filosofo.com.

Setting up the plugin required the creation of a backup directory in the wp-content folder of my blog’s root directory and then changing the write permission to the backup directory, to allow the plugin to create the backup files.

Once I completed the above setup I run my first backup and saved the resulting zipped files to my computer. I also chose to receive a weekly automated backup, sent to my e-mail address, since the WordPress documentation recommends… to backup your backup! Having seen my content disappear before, I find this recommendation worth heeding.

I now owe Austin a latte. It’s not much for the peace of mind I expect in return from this neat plugin!