Ok so I’m not going to go over every single detail simply because I’m no where near an expert on these matters. The thing I definitely excel at is problem solving and research. Which is what saved my ass last night when I thought I lost my database. So first things first is learning about your database. Your database is created by making a bunch of tables. Imagine Excel or Numbers (Apple’s spreadsheet app). It literally makes tables for each specific entry. So for example this specific post will have a post table, categories table, tag table, and probably even a comment table. This is what is stored in the database. Nothing pretty like the colors or images are stored in the database. That’s actually stored on your physical server you pay for month to month. Let’s move on more about the database. There’s this thing called PHPMyAdmin. This usually will always look the same whether your using Media Temple’s servers or even Blue Host. That being said what you need to do is go into php admin. Contact your server provider if you don’t know how to. When you enter you’ll see that all of your databases reside there. Select the database that is connected to your blog (ex: db44282_joesdaily). Now there should be an export option. This part is extremely important. What you want to do is export it as a SQL file. Once this is done you should be all set. I have some more tips below I recommend.

• Backup once a week. If you blog a lot like I do you don’t want to lose a week or two. It will KILL you.
• Always learn about your server before doing anything epic like deleting a database. It’s a good practice to understand the system your running. Whenever I upgrade to anything I try to learn the pros and cons before doing so. Sometimes upgrades can hurt your workflow and you maybe have to wait for them to develop a patch which could take months depending on the developers.
• Never assume your server company does EXTRA backups. I thought my company may do delayed deleting of items lost. Meaning when I delete something by mistake I could call them up and have them retrieve. Well apparently they only do 6 months ghosting. Meaning they do a snapshot of all there servers every six months or so. So that does help but definitely is a downgrade for any blogger since they update there site daily.

Tags: Tips & Tricks