We posted yesterday about WordPress.com founder Matt Mullenweg and his view that cloud computing is marketing speak.
The conversation followed a significant WordPress.com outage. In our research looking into the role that cloud computing played, we discovered a lot of discussions about backing up your WordPress.com account.
One method looks especially interesting.
With an Amazon S3 account, you can do an automatic back up to the cloud with a WordPress plugin called Automatic WordPress Back Up. Dan Coulter developed the plugin. It is sponsored by Web Design Company.
The plugin makes it pretty simple to back up your blog. All you need to do is provide an Amazon S3 account key.
Digital Inspiration’s Amit Agerwal says there are few advantages to this approach:
The plug-in won’t just backup your WordPress databases but it will save a copy of your WordPress themes, plug-ins and other important configuration files (like .htaccess, wp-config.php, etc) to Amazon S3.
Amazon S3 charges you for every byte of data storage so you can set the plugin to automatically delete backups that are older than a month.
You can either run scheduled backups (once per day, or per month) or take snapshots manually. The backup happens in the background and you don’t have to wait in the browser for the process to complete.
Of course there are several ways to back up your WordPress account. But this looks like an effective way to use the cloud to automatically keep your blog backed up in case of an emergency.
