Just search for the term “wordpress backups” in the official WordPress plug-ins directory and you’ll be surprised to know that there exist over 100 plug-ins just to help you easily backup your WordPress database and other associated files.

There are so many choices but most backup plug-ins often work the same – they’ll take a full dump of your MySQL database and will then save the zipped file into the same server that is hosting your WordPress blog. Some plug-ins can even send you backup file as email attachments.

Backup WordPress to Amazon S3

If you are on Amazon S3, you can use the Dan Coulter’s WordPress plug-in to automatically backup your blog to the S3 cloud. There’s absolutely no configuration required – just add your Amazon S3 access keys and the plugin will do the rest. It will even create S3 buckets for you where the WordPress files will get saved.

The plug-in won’t just backup your WordPress databases but it will save a copy of your WordPress themes, plug-ins, upload 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 plug-in 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. The Automatic WordPress Backup plugin is available at wordpress.org but before you hit the download button, here’s a word of caution.

The plug-in, once installed, will automatically add links to the author’s site in your WordPress blog without even asking you. That however should not prevent you from using this extremely useful plugin as the links can be easily removed from the options pages.