How to backup WordPress and Mysql Database on Bluehost using Cron

Recently I migrated my blog over to Bluehost as Godaddy was going to rip me off for $250+ per year on renewal. The migration was simple as I have a Linux background. Their C-Panel was quite standard as well.

Anyways once I had my several wordpress sites migrated, I quickly gained SSH access to my site and started whipping up some scripts to perform wordpress backups.

Once logged into the home directory of my server I started creating two folders namely “backups” & “cron”

The backups directory will store my backups and the cron folder will store the scripts that cron will run.

Backup WordPress files

I started with a script called wwwbackup.sh

#!/bin/bash
# Backup WordPress
# Author: Alfred Tong
#
websites="wordpress1 wordpress2 wordpress3 wordpress4 wordpress5"
for A in $websites
do
tar czvf ~/backups/$A-`date "+%Y%m%d"`.tar.gz ~/www/$A >/dev/null 2>&1
echo "Backup of $A complete."
done

This script is pretty simple. Once executed it takes the the list of wordpress directories that are located in www and archives them into a tar.gz with a date into the backup directory that was created earlier.

Backup WordPress Database

Next I created another script that backups the wordpress databases. Before doing that, I created a backup user using MySQL Databases tool under the Databases Tools section of CPanel.

Then add it to the database and grant it all permissions.

Here’s the script I used to backup the databases.

#!/bin/bash
# Backup WordPress Database
# Author: Alfred Tong
#
databases="wordpressdb1 wordpressdb2 wordpressdb3"
user="backup"
password="backup_password"

for A in $databases
do
/usr/bin/mysqldump -u $user -p$password $A | gzip -9 > ~/backups/$A-`date "+%Y%m%d"`.sql.gz
EXITCODE=$?
if [ $EXITCODE -ne 0 ]
then
        echo "Backup failed with exit code $EXITCODE"
else
	echo "Database $A backup complete"
fi
done

This script once executed will perform a dump of the database defined in the databases list and archive it into a gzip file with a date into the backup directory.

Setup a cron job in Cpanel

The next thing to do is now setup a scheduled cron job to execute these scripts. In the Cpanel of Bluehost under advanced there is a “Cron Job” tool.

Then I selected to execute the scripts I created weekly to perform a weekly backup.

Done!