Are you making daily backups of your WordPress blog(s) on a regular basis? If you're not, you might want to start. Someday you'll be glad you've taken this simple preventive measure. I learned the hard way about backing up hard drives and I just learned WordPress blogs work the same way.

I had an unpleasant experience with my WordPress blogs a few weeks ago that prompted me to make regular backups. After a few hours of tweaking a few blogs and loading them up with a weeks worth of posts, I was brimming with a sense of accomplishment. And the next morning everything had disappeared. Where all the data went nobody knows. My host couldn't figure it out and neither could I. So there I was stuck with a couple hours of rework the next day. That's definitely not the most productive use of time.

Oddly enough, the very same day this happened to me a famous Internet marketer made a post on his blog about making frequent backups of your data because his hard drive had crashed. No one is immune from this occurrence. It's more a question of "when" as opposed of "if". I followed more normal research routine which consisted of typing the search term "backup wordpress blog" into my favorite search engine and 5 seconds later I had found a plug-in that backs up your database automatically at whatever interval you desire whether that's daily, weekly, or monthly. The file is automatically sent to an email address you supply.

Installing the plug-in and setting up the daily back ups is a snap. I had it all done in less than 5 minutes. It's a comforting feeling to know that even if some strange event were to completely wipe out my blog I could quickly have it up and running again because I have a backup.

I've posted the instructions on my blog or you can search for the title of the post which is "Daily Backups for WordPress with GMail."