What would you do if you woke up one morning and all of the posts from your blog were just gone? Would you panic and then remember you have an up-to-date backup of your files? Or would you just cry because all your hard work had been obliterated by some jerk?

Your content is your blog’s heart and soul. And if you host your own WordPress blog, you are unfortunately just as likely to get hacked as anyone else. But there are quick and easy ways to ensure that all the posts you pour your blood, sweat and tears don’t just vanish into cyberspace one day.

If you’re a fan of No Ordinary Homestead on Facebook, you probably saw that I recently had a big scare when I thought that all the posts in my blog (over 1300 posts) had been erased. Thankfully it was just a glitch with the database but it made me realize that even though I get weekly backups of my blog emailed to me, sometimes that’s just not enough.

If you have a blog yourself and run WordPress, you should think about installing something like the free WordPress Database Backup plugin. It’s a simple plugin that will allow you to run a backup of your database with just a few clicks…or if you prefer, backups can be emailed (or saved on your server) daily, weekly, etc. Your core files of layout and such will still need to be backed up manually, but at least you won’t lose all your posts and comments.

Because I write on new posts all the time, I realized after my scare last week that a daily backup is really more prudent. But it’s all a question of how often you’re adding stuff to your blog. And if you’re really concerned about hackers, I also recommend the WP Defender ebook with instructional how-to videos (not an affiliate link) which is loaded with lots of quick, easy ways to better protect your WordPress blog from attackers.

As if the blog scare wasn’t enough, my laptop also started crashing yesterday for no apparent reason. And I have to say that when Vista crashes, it’s even more fun than some of the others because your screen just sorta fades out for instead of going to the blue screen. Then you may get a blue screen when it tries to reboot and fails. Otherwise you just wonder if your battery died or if something has otherwise gone horribly wrong.

I have been telling myself for weeks now that I needed to back up the files on my laptop, but so many other things just kept getting in the way. So when the laptop started flaking out on me yesterday, I knew it was time to take action. Despite the laptop only being a few months old, I’m not exactly easy on my equipment and treat my laptops more like huge desktop PC’s, running tons of programs at once while I edit photos, look up this and that, and otherwise just keep my RAM full at all times. So now I’ve added some reminders to my google calendar (which is my life saver in the chaotic zone I call life) to save all the files on my laptop once a month, as well as backup website files for things like WordPress that I don’t edit and save on my computer.

If you’re not very good at checking things off your to do list, you can also try software like Cobian Backup (free open source backup option) which will automatically back up your computer to another location (at home, on a server, online, etc). But the nice thing about it, is that you can schedule downloads of all the files on your web server too.

So now before you do anything else today, go back up your files. Computer crashes always seem to happen at the least opportune times.