Yesterday morning/afternoon I lost my WP database. Completely. Entirely. In total. Everything gone! Fortunately, because I’m such a computer expert dumbass, I learned to always make a backup. I know. I know. Nobody makes backups. Well, I do. Do ya think maybe that in the past I’ve had similar disasters, perhaps of greater magnitude? Yup! And I learned my lesson a long, long time ago.

Thankfully, the good man at Il Filosofo has a plugin that he is managing for just such a purpose. I had it installed, and it was emailing me the backups on a weekly basis. Yes, that’s right, you can schedule backups weekly, daily or hourly, via email, server save, or direct download

After a phone call to lunarpages.com I was back up and running with a re-install of my WP database. Only one post was missing – yesterday’s – which I replaced. Thank you, lunarpages for your fantastic customer service. The entire fiasco lasted only an hour or so, no big deal time-wise.

Following my restore, I immediately set my backup schedule to daily. You may call me silly paranoid if you wish.

Consequently, I’ve been doing some investigating regarding backup plugins, and I’ve discovered another very useful backup routine by GaMerZ called WP-DBManager 2.10 for version 2.1 of WordPress. It puts a Database menu selection on the Dashboard. As of this morning it’s installed and running well. I didn’t even have to tweak it. The interface is simple and easy to understand, and has options for email, download and restore. You can even optimize your database. It does not provide for automatic backups, but that’s all right. I’ll run it in conjunction with the other. In fact, I already have.

I use another plugin from GaMerZ. It’s WP-Ban 1.10. It permits me to ban users by IP or host name and even allows a customized ban message to be displayed to the bad boy (or girl). So far, I’ve not had reason to use it.

As I have discovered, the WordPressWorld is diverse and varied. By means of search engines I’ve been able to discover and make use of a wide variety of plugins to save my ass help me manage this newfound interest. There is an entire net full of themes and plugins to satisfy my every whim.

Thanks to all of you.