Straightforward, simple instructions for a critical task: How to do a Full WordPress Backup and Restore. Vladimir Prelovac, on his blog, Prelovac.com, does things which seem to fall into two categories. The first is providing concise and clear instructions on important subjects which, despite their importance, don’t inspire people to write oustanding tutorials (or perhaps they consist of search terms so common that it’s hard to find them via search engines). We’ll get to Vladimir’s second area of brilliance in a moment.

I have only one thing to add to his advice, which includes using the excellent plugin WP-DBManager, by Lester Chan. Be careful that you don’t set the plugin to backup too often without removing older backups. The reason is that some web hosts, because of the way Unix works, are even more concerned about the number of files on their servers than they are about space. I ran afoul of my hosting company’s limits by being a little careless about the settings in WP-DBManager. It doesn’t take very long to generate a few hundred thousand files when you back up a WordPress installation.

The second is adding some great powerful functionality – e.g. the Insights plugin. Insights permits you, while you’re composing a post, and without leaving the editing window, to search your own blog (“didn’t we write something about this before that we should refer to here?”); open-license images (“wouldn’t a picture of, say, a cherry make this post perfect?”), videos, Wikipedia, news, blogs, and books, all of which permit you to very efficiently improve a post by making it more authoritative, more persuasive, clearer, and more entertaining.

Using Insights, I’m able to quickly retrieve earlier posts about Vladimir: Here’s our earlier post about Insights: Insights Plugin: finding images, citations, references while composing. This plugin’s so good that I don’t mind at all repeating myself.

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