Let Me Begin… Just five WordPress plug-in posts left now! Rather than trying to decide which to recommend the most/first, I’ve just been writing about them in alphabetical order. Different people use blogs for different reasons and write about different topics, so my number one recommended plug-in for one person’s site might be totally useless to you. That said, WP-DBManager is likely to be useful to almost everyone running a WordPress blog. As you may guess from the not-too-cryptic name, it helps you to look after your database. A lot of the features could be achieved by using PHPMyAdmin. This would require your hosting company to use that interface, you to remember your user name and password, and no automation would occur.
Using WP-DBManager means you can optimize, repair, backup & restore your database, as well as delete backups database , drop and empty indivudal tables and run selected queries. You can also (the most important feature for me) have database backups automatically created and e-mailed to you. If you only write a new post every week or so, there is little point in having the database backed up every 24 hours (unless you receive a LOT of comments), similarly, if you are writing about WorPress plugins five times a day, it makes sense to at least have daily backups emailed to you.
Should you wish, you can also directly run SQL queries, and have the database optimized as often as you like. Having just re-read this post before publishing, I realize I should probably point out that the database holds almost all of the data you would want backed up in case you needed to restore all your posts, comments and WordPress and plug-in options. If your server gets hacked (and your host doesn’t keep decent backups) or if you accidentally install something that wipes parts of your blog out, then these backups will contain all you need. Obviously any external files (like videos and pictures) would not be included, but you will probably have those backed up on your home PC.
Now go and jump around 🙂