This post was written for the students of the Columbia College Chicago class Blogging: Beyond the Basics in the Fall semester of 2014. It likely refers to specific software or settings that may quickly be out of date and may not apply to your situation, even in a future semester of the same class.

If you’re going to maintain your blog after class, you’re going to need to move it to a different host, because the IAM department won’t maintain these blogs for too long. And even after that you might find yourself moving your blog between hosting services for a variety of reasons like cost, performance, features of some new blogging software, etc.

This first part of the process is about backing up your WordPress site, so you have a copy to import somewhere else. Exactly how you need to back it up depends a little on what kind of host you’re moving to, but it never hurts to back up in multiple ways to have options in the future.

Method 1: Built-in Export

By default, WordPress has a simple export built-in. In the dashboard, under Tools there’s the option Export. There are hardly any options, just leave All Content selected and click “Download Export File”. Your browser will download a small XML file to your default download folder. “All Content” doesn’t mean what you might think it does—it includes all your posts, pages, comments, custom fields, terms, navigation menus and custom posts, but not images, themes, plugins, etc.

The file is small and easily backed up—you can even just email it to yourself, Also, this is the format you’ll need if you’re switching switching from WordPress to some other blogging platform. You can use an SFTP client like Filezilla or Cyberduck to log into your students.iam.colum.edu account and download the public_html/wordpress/wp-content/uploads folder in order to backup all your images.

Method 2: Backup Plugins

There are a huge variety of plugins for WordPress that let you backup to local storage, for download, or to Cloud storage services like DropBox or GoogleDrive.

I installed a plugin called “BackUpWordPress”. It added a Backups item to my Tools menu. I went into the Settings link there and changed the Backup selection from “Database Only” to “Database and Files”. I saved those settings and then clicked Run Now. It only took a few moments for the backup to run and then it was available to download via a link. This zip file contains everything needed to restore your whole blog to another WordPress installation, including posts, images, plugins, themes, and so on.

Next post, we’ll look at where you can move your blog to.