I wouldn’t usually write on this topic. It’s just generally not that kind of blog. But after a near disaster which continues to unfold, I felt compelled to share some thoughts.

Last week my business photography site (which is driven by the Wordpress engine) was hacked by someone or something in the Netherlands. All of the design files for the site were completely destroyed. Lucky for me, though, the main databases weren’t touched. I was able to retrieve the site’s content from the database. Although the design files were gone, the months and months of content building was not.

Since the incident, it’s become clear just how fragile a website can be and since most of my income relies on potential clients being able to see my site, regular backups are clearly of absolute importance. Trouble is, backing up a database is cumbersome. It’s just not something I’m likely to have time to do regularly.

Now enter Wordpressbackup.com. This is a service I discovered while browsing the Wordpress plugins directory searching for an automated solution.

Wordpressbackup.com makes automatic, periodic backups of your wordpress database and stores them remotely. From there, with a single click, you can download the backup for recovery or redundancy (which is what I do).

The service is easy to set up. Just register a username at wordpressbackup.com, then install the companion plugin on your site. Finally, paste the special code from the wordpress plugin into your wordpressbackup.com account page. Then, it just kind of works.

The site is clean and simple. Loads fast. And, couldn’t be any easier to get around. In fact, my only complaint is that it won’t save login information.

The service is free of charge for the time being. There is a one-site, 5mb limit on storage size, but this should be sufficient for most users. Although there isn’t a paid service, per se, donation is highly encouraged and they state that they’re willing to work with the specific needs of benefactors—within reason, of course.

Anyone running a blog, or business site on Wordpress should find this service to be a huge boon in the case of disaster. If you do decide to use it, donate a few bucks, you can spare it and they can use it.