Posts from 2006

Securely backing up a wordpress configuration to a remote location

I have been using wordpress as my blogging engine for quite some time. To ensure that I can recover my blog in the event of a disaster (a good example would be a server catching on fire), I take weekly backups of the MySQL database that stores my posts and the wordpress configuration.Since the wordpress backups are relatively small, I typically use mysqldump to extract the data from the MySQL database, and openssl to encrypt the data. This allows me to email my backup to a remote location, and ensures that prying eyes cannot view any data that might be sensitive. To accomplish this, I use the following shell script: This solution has worked well for me for the past two years, and I have never had a problem running openssl with the "-d" (decrypt data) option to decrypt the data that openssl's "-e" (encrypt data) option produces…