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Cloud Storage is on the rise now and its time for us to take advantage of them. As a blogger or webmaster, Your website files and databases might be the most valuable online stuff you have so it becomes very important to save/protect them from damage or loss. What more could worsen your life as a webmaster than a bunch of website files that were the result of countless hours of hard work? The Golden solution to all those worries are ‘Backup’ , I know the word is familiar and we both love and hate it (hate coz its boring task ) Most of us are lazy to take offsite backups and end up making an archive of the website files on the server itself, This can cost us heavily if for some reason our webhost fails or the site gets hacked and the malicious hacker erases all our files. Hence its always recommended to take offsite backups. Offsite backups can be broadly classified into:

1. Offline Backup – Downloading the website files from our webserver to your home PC Hard Disk.
2. Online Backup – Remote uploading your website files directly to remote hosts like FTP,Cloud Storages or other servers without having to download all the files to your PC.

I know the online backup and remote uploading part has tempted you the most! Thankfully that’s what we are going to discuss in here. WordPress has two basic parts that needs to backed up.

1. WordPress Files – To be precise, Your wp-contents folder is the main folder that needs to be backed up and it contains all the files like Theme Customized Files, Uploaded Post Images,Plugin files etc. Other folders like wp-admin need not be backed up since it can be restored from a fresh wordpress installation.
2. WordPress Database – This is the core of your wordpress and it contains all the settings you made on your wordpress site like the WordPress Posts,Pages,Comments, Settings, Plugin configuration (Not plugin files) etc.

Therefore these are the two things that needs to be backed up on a regular basis from a wordpress based site.

Two Free Cloud Storage for Backups.

The two cloud storage hosts that we are going to use for our Free Backup Storage are DropBox and SugarSync. Both of them have Free and Paid option for Cloud Storage. Dropbox provides 2GB of Free Cloud Storage while SugarSync provides 5GB storage. The best part is you can earn more Free Storage by doing simple tasks like Invite your friends to the website via your referral link and earn 125 or 250 MB Free Bonus Storage.

How to Backup your WordPress to Free Cloud Storage Automatically.

Step 1. To get started signup on SugarSync and Dropbox. Use your Email and a Strong password.

Step 2. Verify the Email Activation and Login to each of them and create a New Folder something like ‘Blog Name Backup‘. Optionally you can download the free softwares provided by them to manage your files from desktop.

Step 3. Login to your WordPress Dashboard and Go to Plugin Install section and search for ‘BackWPup’ plugin, Install and Activate it.

Step 4. Go to BackWPup settings in the Left Bottom corner of dashboard and Follow the given Setup Steps to link your Cloud Storage to WordPress.

Step 5. Setup SugarSync section in the BackWPup settings as follows:

Step 6. Setup Dropbox section in the BackWPup settings as follows, Click on the Authenticate button, Login to your account. Allow Access.

Step 7. In the Job Schedule section below the Save Button, Click on the Activate Scheduling, Choose the appropriate backup scheduling.

Step 8. Leave all the rest of the settings as the Default ones and Click Save Changes.

Step 9. (Optional) If your cloud storage is running low on Disk Space, You can choose the File Format as ‘Tar Gzip’ from the Backup File box below the Job Schedule. This will compress your file to a huge extent.

That was it with the tutorial, Hope you liked it. Do share your views on the same via your comments.

Anoop Sudhakaran is a Tech Blogger from Mumbai, India and blogs at HackTabs. HackTabs has a variety of topics like Internet Security , Blogging Guide , Hostgator Review, etc.