WordPress Backups and A Bloated Gmail Account

Everyone who uses WordPress understands, or at least knows that they have to regularly backup their databases.

Every time a new version of WordPress is released, your reminded to backup your database before upgrading, So we know backups are important, but do we have to manually do this every time?

I have found that the best way to keep on top of your back-ups is to set up an automatic backup of your database and have it delivered directly to your emails inbox, that way you can set and forget, and every time your asked to upgrade your WordPress installation you can be confident that you have a recent version of your database on file.

The plugin I use for this automation is the WP-DBManager by the incredibly talented Lester Chan,. (There would be other plugins you could use that would do this also, I just haven’t tried them.)

It is a very simple plugin to set up and install so I wont go into the specifics of setting it up, but I do want to mention that, with the plugin you can determine how often you want your database backup sent to your desired email account, from once every minute to once a month.

To always have the most recent version of your database on hand it would make sense to set the delivery of your database to at least once per day, but in doing this it won’t take long to bloat your inbox with database backups and use up all of the allowed storage that you get with your free Gmail account.

The way I get around this is by setting up a specific Gmail account and send all of my databases to that one account, but even then the new Gmail account will have a limit on the amount of storage I can have.

Note: To avoid filling up my Gmail account, the trick is to create a filter for my Databases.

Creating a filter is incredibly easy to do and will save you heaps of time from going in and deleting your old versions of your databases, and stop your Gmail account from getting bloated from all of your old backups.

If you don’t already have a spare Gmail account that you can use for your database delivery go and get one

After you have set up your Gmail account that will be specifically used for your databases, and you have at least one Database backup in your inbox, open the email sent to you from your WordPress site.

Once you have it opened, Copy the From email sender details, it should look something like this YourWebsite.com Administrator.

Then click on the Create a filter link you see next to the Search Mail, Search The Web buttons at the top of your Gmail inbox.

Once the filter page is opened, paste in the sender details that you just copied into the Has the words text box, then click on the Next Step button just under the text fields.

What you want to do in this page is check the Delete it option and the Also apply filter to XXX conversations below check box, click on the Create Filter button to continue.

“Why would you want to delete your brand new database backup”. I hear you ask, in the next step you will see how this will work.

If you now go to your Trash folder you will see a note at the very top of the folders inbox that says (messages that have been in Trash more than 30 days will be automatically deleted), isn’t that cool.

You can send all of your backups straight to the trash folder and any backups older than a month old will be deleted from your email account.

Now you have a full months worth of backed up databases and a clean Gmail account that isn’t clogged up with old and out of date databases.

Come to think of it, you probably don’t even need a second Gmail account to do this, but by having the second Gmail account it will save you from having to sift through your trash emails to find your current databases.

If you find this little trick handy, why not share it with someone you know by linking to this page. Hey you could always tweet it by clicking on the Tweet this button at the top of the post.