Friday Church Planting Resource: wp Time Machine A Backup for Your WordPress Site

Many church planters are utilizing WordPress to run their websites.  I did a post on the reasons why a couple months back.  For many church planters backing up a website either doesn’t cross their minds or its so low on the priority list it doesn’t happen.  Now there’s no excuse, because of a handy plug-in I found this week.  I found it on someone else’s blog but for the life of me can’t find it now to give them credit.  WP Time Machine backs up all the files of your WordPress site through Dropbox, Amazon S3, or FTP.  Since Dropbox is free and I already use it, I chose it to store my backups.  Here’s how easy it is.

1.  Go to your plugins page on WordPress and search for wp Time Machine.  It’s the first result that pops up.

2.  Download and activate the plugin.

3.  Go to Settings: wp Time Machine

4.  This is the trickiest part.  You’ll see the screen below.  Enter your login information for Dropbox.  Under directory, you can put the name of a folder you would like to store the files in on Dropbox.  It will create the folder in Dropbox for you and place the files there.

5.  Finally, click the “Generate wp Time Machine archive” button.  Wait a couple of minutes and you’ve got a backup of your site.

Unlike Time Machine on a mac, wp Time Machine does not automatically schedule backups of your site.  You’ll have to do that manually.  So for the forgetful prone, you may want to stick a reminder in your calendar.  This is a dead easy way to back up your WordPress site.