Login to your WordPress admin area and navigate to the Settings -> General screen

Check the option “Anyone can register”

When a user self-registers, WordPress can assign a default role to the new user. You can read more about WordPress Roles and Capabilities here. Here’s a quick summary of the roles:

• Administrator – Somebody who has access to all the administration features
• Editor – Somebody who can publish and manage posts and pages as well as manage other users’ posts, etc.
• Author – Somebody who can publish and manage their own posts
• Contributor – Somebody who can write and manage their posts but not publish them
• Subscriber – Somebody who can only manage their profile

If you are not sure about which role to pick, pick Subscriber as the other roles all allow users to add content to your website at the very least.

Once self-registration is enabled, the WordPress login screen will have a “Register” link as shown above. You may have to inform your users about how to get to the login page. The login page can usually reached by this url:

http://yourwebsite.com/wp-login.php

When the Register link is clicked, WordPress displays the Registration screen which looks like this. The user can specify the username of their choice and an email address.

WordPress creates the account and emails the password to the user.

The screenshot above shows what the email looks like.

The email contains:

1. The Username
2. The Password
3. And the Login URL

When the user logs into the system, he is shown the Profile page as shown above. The Profile page allows the user change his profile settings, including changing the password. A user with a different Role (such as an administrator) will see different settings.

WordPress provides basic capabilities for creation and self-registration of users. If you need more advanced functionality try some of the more advanced plugins. Some are free while others are paid.

If you have questions, put them down in the comments section below.

If you have a favorite membership plugin, let us know what you use and why.

So you have done all the hard work of setting up a backup plugin. And you have ensured that your site gets backed up on a regular schedule.

And unfortunately something has gone wrong with your website that requires a recovery from the the backup.

First, determine the extent of the damage:

- Do you need to restore the database?
- Do you need to restore the WordPress files?
- Or do you need to restore both?

Perhaps you are not sure which files need to be restored. Or you may not know whether the database is completely hosed, or simply missing a few rows.

In this article I will show you how to completely restore your website assuming you have been doing a complete backup which includes all the WordPress files.

First, do another manual backup of the website and keep it just in case you need some files or data from it.

After this you are ready to wipe your website clean.

If you are not confident enough to restore the site yourself and need an expert to restore your site, contact us and we will be happy to work with you.

If you want to start with a clean slate and restore the entire site to the state it was in at the time of the last backup then you will need to delete all the WordPress files and delete all the data from your WordPress data.

Ok, if you are sure about proceeding then lets begin.

Step 2) Delete all the data from your wordpress database:

Most cPanels provide phpMyAdmin for database administration. Using phpMyAdmin, drop all the wordpress database tables that are used by the site.

If the database is used by multiple websites make sure to delete only the database tables used by the site that you want to restore.

Using your FTP client or your Hosting Provider’s cPanel, delete all the files under your website’s root folder. Usually the root folder is called public_html or www. Delete all the files and folders under this folder.

In the screenshot above, the WordPress installation is under /public_html/testbackup. Most WordPress sites are installed directly under public_html.

Most hosting providers will provide phpMyAdminor similar interface for database administration. Using phpMyAdmin, drop all the wordpress database tables that are used by the site.
If the database is used by multiple websites make sure to delete only the database tables used by the site that you want to restore.

1) Choose the correct database
2) Select all the tables. If the database is used by multiple websites make sure to delete only the database tables used by the site that you want to restore.
3) Choose the "Drop" action. This deletes the selected tables from the database.

1) Copy the backup zipfile to your wordpress root folder (usually public_html).
2) Unzip the zipfile.

Your files are now restored! Really.

The backup file contains a called <database_name>.sql – where <database_name> is the name of your database. This file contains all the necessary instructions to retore your database to its last known state.

In order to insert this data into your database download and copy the restore script from this zip file (http://api.backwpup.com/download/backwpup_db_restore.zip) to your website’s root folder. This zipfile contains backwpup_db_restore.php. Now this file (backwpup_db_restore.php) should be alongside wp-config.php and wp-content folder under your root folder.

Now visit this URL from the browser: http://your.website.com/backwpup_db_restore.php and follow the prompts

All the necessary fields will automatically get filled. You don’t have to add or change any data.

The Restore script alows you to change the URL of your site. Note: This means that you can use this process to change the URL of your site – not just for restoring a broken site!

Click the Restore button

The script will show a confirmation screen as show above.

Now you’re website is restored!!!

But you are not yet done. There is one very important step left.

Using your FTP program (FileZilla shown above) or your hosting provider’s cPanel, delete the backup SQL file and the restore script.

This is extremely important. If you keep these files around an unautorized person can invoke the restore script or even learn the database name and password and hack into your website!

Thats it!

Your website is restored to the state of the last backup!

And this concludes this 5-part series on WordPress Backups.

What are your backup strategies? What are your lessons learned? Do you have any stories about how a timely backup saved your site and your sanity? Let us known in the comments below.

In this step we will configure your backup job to store the backup file in Amazon S3. If you want to learn how to setup a backup job read the second article in the series. If you have not signed for an Amazon S3 account yet, read the third article in this series for step-by-step instructions on signing up for Amazon S3.Ok, now that you have setup a basic backup job, lets open it in Edit mode. Scroll down to the section titled Backup to Amazon S3:

1. Enter your Amazon Key ID
2. Enter your Amazon Secret Access Key
3. If you have created any buckets in S3 already then they will appear in the Buckets drop-down. You can choose an existin bucket here
4. If you don’t have any buckets yet (or you want to use a new one), just enter the name for your new bucket in the “Create bucket:” textbox.
   A bucket is like a folder on your computer.
5. You can store your backup file in the bucket, or you can create a sub-directory under the bucket to store your backup file. This is optional and you can leave this field blank.
   In the screenshot above, I have chosen to create a sub-directory called “backwup”
6. To avoid filling up your S3 storage with lots of old backup files, specify the number of backup files that you want to retain.
   I do not keep more than 5 backup files.
   You may choose to keep more or less backup files.

Automating the backup program to run on an automated schedule is easy.In the “Job Schedule” section, do the following:

1. Check the “Activate scheduling” checkbox. This configures the program to run on an automated schedule.
2. Then choose the frequency at which you want to create the backup.
   If you update your website very frequently, say you poost articles on a daily basis, then you should consider creating a backup on a dily basis.
   If you update your website infrequently, then a weekly or even monthly frequency may be appropriate for you.
   Simply choose your frequency and the time of the day (and the day and date if choose a frequency less than daily) that you want to create the backup.
3. Click the “Save Changes” button to save your job configuration.

Now lets test the backup job. In order to test it we will:

• run the job manually
• check the progress displayed on the screen and ensure there are no errors
• check the Amazon S3 bucket and confirm that the backup file got uploaded properly by the backup jobTo run the job manually, go to tje Job Overview page and hover the mouse ober the job name.
  A list of links will appear below the job name.
  Click the “Run Now” link.
  This will start the backup job and display the progress on the screen as shown below.

And finally, log on to your Amazon S3 account and check if the backup file made it.

Congratulations! You have created a backup job using the BackWPup plugin and configured it to create and store backups to Amazon S3 automatically on a periodic schedule!

In the next article (Part 5 of 5) you will learn how to restore your WordPress site from your backup.

Setting up a backup process for your blog or website is one of the most important things that many people ignore. It is like insurance — by the time you need it, its too late. We don’t setup a backup process either because we don’t realize its importance (until it is too late). Or because we are too lazy. Or it looks too daunting. Or we just don’t know how.

Sometimes people setup a backup process, but keep the backup files on the same server that runs their website. Sure, this is better than not setting up any backup process at all, but this leaves them expose to the eventuality of losing their backups if the system running the website crashes. To be really safe, backup files should be stored somewhere other than the server running your website. That is, you should store your backups “offsite”.

Now, storing your backups “offsite” simply means storing your backups in some place other than the machine that is running your website. This means you have the following options:

1. Email: This is the easiest to understand. You can have the backup program email the backup files to youself, but some email services do not allow large files to be attached to emails (and backup files can get large).
2. Download it manually: You can manually download the backup file. But this means you have to remember to do this on a regular basis. This is not the best use of your time.
3. FTP: Some backup programs also allow you to FTP the backup files to another machine. But this requires to have another hosting service that you can FTP the files to — most people don’t have another hosting service.

So, what is the best option for “offsite” backup storage?

Enter Amazon S3.

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is a web-based cloud-storage service. Basically, it means that you can store any data (such as you backup files) “in the cloud” on Amazon.com’s servers and take advantage of Amazon’s scale and reliability. Amazon S3 is <quote>designed to provide 99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability of objects over a given year <end-quote>. Although recent events demonstrated that even Amazon can have a bad day, using Amazon S3 for storing your backups is still a good solution.

And the best part is, for most people, it won’t cost them anything.

At the time of this writing, Amazon offers a “Free Usage Tier” which should allow most small websites to use Amazon S3 for backups for free.

The best part of using Amazon S3 is that, for most people, it won’t cost anything. Signing up for an Amazon S3 account is free. you only pay when you use the service — and that too ONLY if your usage goes above the Free Usage Tier.

At the time of this writing, Amazon offers a “Free Usage Tier”, which gives you free storage of up to 5GB of storage per month.

A zipped up backup file for a typical small business wordpress website will be under 1 GB (most likely it will be less than 500MB) — so you are covered by the 5GB size.

The “Request Pricing” chart relates to the number of times you will perform backups. Every time you perform a backup, the backup file gets uploaded to Amazon S3. This results in one “PUT” request to Amazon. If you download your backup file from Amazon S3 (say to your local machine), this results in one “GET” request.
Amazon’s Free Tier allows 1,000 PUT requests (thats the number of times you can create backup files and upload to Amazon) in a month. And it allows 20,000 GET requests (that’s the number of times you can download your backup files in a month)! That’s more than enough for the purpose of backing up your website.

There is one more consideration: The size of the backup file that you will be uploading to Amazon S3 every time you backup over the period of a month.
Amazon’s Free Tier allow a total of 15 GB data to be uploaded to Amazon S3 in a month.

Let’s use an example to illustrate this.

Let’s say the size of your backup file is 1 GB. and let’s say you have setup your backup program to run once a week. Let’s also assume that there are 5 weeks in a month (there are about 4.5 — but lets be on the safe side).
This means that in a month you will upload 5GB (1 GB x 5) worth of data to Amazon every month. This is well under 15 GB.

Most small websites should be able to use Amazon S3 for storing their backups once a week for FREE !

This article will walk you through each step of signing up for an Amazon S3 account. The provided screenshots should, hopefully, take all the guesswork out of the signup process. And remeber, it costs nothing to signup — you get charged only when you start using the service, and that too only if you exceed the usage provided in the Free Usage Tier. So go ahead and sign up NOW

Go to http://aws.amazon.com/s3/
Click on the ‘Sign Up Now’ button and enter your desired login username and password

Enter your Contact Information

Now Amazon verifies that you say who you are.
In order to verify your identity, Amazon will call the phone number you provided.

As soon as you click the “Call Me Now” button, a 4 digit PIN will be displayed on the screen.
And your phone will ring.
Answer the phone when it rings.
An automated message will ask you to enter the PIN that is displayed on the screen.
Enter the 4 digit PIN in your phone

As soon as you enter the PIN on the phone, the screen will change to show you the ‘continue’ button.

Your Identity Verification is complete.

Click the ‘continue’ button.

Once you click the ‘continue’ button, you will see the above page.

Check your email account. You should see two emails from Amazon Web Services.

The email with the subject “AWS Unified Registration Sign-Up Confirmation” indicates that your account has been activated.

Congratulations! You have successfully creating an Amazon S3 account!

Now you are ready to configure BackWPup to store your backups on Amazon S3. This will be covered in the next article: How to backup your WordPress site to Amazon S3 using BackWPup backup plugin (Part 4 of 5)

After trying a few free WordPress backup plugins and experimenting with a few manual and semi-automated processes for backups, I have settled on the BackWPup plugin for automating the backups of my WordPress websites.

To install the plugin, login to your WordPress site as an admin, then

1. Click on “Add New” under Plugins
2. Search for “BackWPup”
3. Click “Install Now”

The plugin will install itself. After it says “Successfully installed …”,

1. Click the “Activate Plugin” link to activate the plugin

After you activiate the plugin, the plugins list page will be displayed.

1. Click the “Settings” links under BackWPup

1. Click the “Settings” link in the top-right menu
2. Change the email address to be your own email address if needed. By default your admin email will be used.
3. Change “0″ to “7″ to save the last 7 log files. This is only useful for troubleshooting.
4. Click “Save Change”

You will not need to change anything else on this screen (unless you know what you are doing).

1. Click “Jobs”
2. Click “Add New”

After you click the ‘Add New” button, the Job Settings screen s displayed.
This screen can look quite daunting, but fear not — to create a manual backup Job you can pretty much accept all the defaults.

1. Just provide a name (I suggest calling this job “Manual Backup”)
2. Uncheck the checkbox which says “Only send an e-mail if there are errors.” — I like to receive emails on successful completion of the backup as well. This provides me with the peace of mind knowing that the job completed successfully. The notification will be sent to the email specified here. You can change it to a different email address if you prefer
3. Click “Save Changes”
4. Click the “Jobs” link to go back to the jobs listing screen

And you have created a Manual Backup “job” (A “job” here just means a specific configuration).

When we execue this job, the backup file will get created in the directory indicated in the “Backup to Directory” section. Make a note of this directory.

1. Click the “Run Now” link under the job you just created (The Run Now link will appear when you move your mouse over the name of the job)

You will see the output of the backup process as shown above.
In my case I get two warnings that I can safely ignore.

Once this process is completed, open your favorite FTP program and download the ZIP file from the Download directory that you noted in the step above.
Make sure you can open the generated ZIP file using your favorite archove utility (you can download the free and very good 7-Zip archive utility if you don’t have WinZip).

That’s it! You have successfully created a manual backup of your website.

In the next two articles we will signup for Amazon S3 and configure the plugin to store the backup files in Amazon S3.