Let's play a game. First I'm going to take some random words and write down their meanings right here like so:

WordPress: WordPress is a web publishing system written in PHP and backed by a MySQL database. WordPress is used to manage frequently-updated web content, especially blogs. It is distributed under the GNU General Public License and is available free of charge.

Backup: The copying of data for the purpose of having a second copy of an original source, in case of damage to the original data source.

Week: A period of seven days.

Then I'm going to put them all together and show you this.

That's right, WordPress is advocating blog security and protection by holding the WordPress Backup Week on the 23rd to the 30th of July.

What this means is that they will be putting up all sorts of helpful information on their forums and on the codex in order to make is as easy as possible for you to make sure that your wordpress database…which just happens to contain all your posts, comments, user ID's, and option data…is safely backed up in case the worse would happen.

I mean…come to think of it, WordPress isn't like other hosted blogging solutions like Blogger. Our data isn't stored on some massive central database which probably has multiple backups of its own in case of server failure. Whatever we have, we have to take care of it on our own…cause if we lose our database on the server…we lose everything.

And I mean everything.

I do NOT want to lose almost 3 years worth of memories.

Of course, WordPress makes it easy as well. You CAN manually log into your webhost and do all the geeky mumbo jumbo to backup your essential database. You CAN do that. Or…you could be a lazy bum like myself and install one of the nifty database backup plugins that WordPress has and backup everything at one push of a button.

Or in my case automatically everyday.

Right into my mailbox.

No problems and certainly no confusing mess.

So what are you waititng for? Start backing up your systems now. In fact, start getting into the habit of backing up your database regularly. You'll never know when danger might strike. You'll never know when your server might fail you.

Remember…backing up is not just for your car.

It's a necessity for blogging.