Backup Your Blog
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There’s a service called BackupMyBlog that will automatically back up your blog on a daily basis. It sounds terrific at first glance but after a quick perusal of their FAQ its shortcomings became apparent.
The first negative is that it has a 10 MB backup space limitation. After the limit has been reached your older backups will be automatically deleted. Hurrumph.
The second negative is that it won’t work with Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, MySpace or other hosted blog services because it needs to install scripts on the blog server. Bummer!
The likelihood of a hosted service like Google’s Blogspot ever losing your posts is extremely remote given the number of backup servers that they have. Nevertheless, if you’re like me it feels comforting to know that at least I have my own backup.
Blog Bloke to the Rescue
I’ve used a free product called WinHTTRack Website Copier and it works very well. The product is open source and of course is FREE. I could also mention other laborious methods of backing up but I won’t waste your time.
The only drawback is that it’s not automatic. You do have a method of reminding yourself don’t you? Problem solved. Did I also mention that it’s free? But I regress.
By the way, for me the WinHTTRack default setup works best and in the ‘Action’ options choose ‘Download web sites’ (no questions). Be sure to make a special folder on your hard drive to download the file into and remember where you put it is so you can find it later.
WordPress users of course can backup their posts by exporting it from the “Manage” section in the dashboard. You can also back up the entire blog from your blog host’s CPanel.
Then it’s simply a matter of downloading the backup file to your desktop. If you really want to be paranoid (like I am) then you will also copy your backup to an external hard drive or burn it to a CD.
Blogger users can download a copy of their template in the HTML section. Blogger’s new “in draft” version also has an option for backing up posts. They can also create a Wordpress blog and import their posts.
Create a free account at http://wordpress.com/ and then import from the “Manage”, “Import” dashboard sections. That way you will have a copy online in case your computer becomes corrupted.
It’s also a great place to store your images for free. But remember to set your privacy settings to block the search engines so you won’t be penalized for duplicate content.
Happy blogging!
*This post has been recently updated since it’s first publishing May 16 2006
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Thanks for the info Bloke. And might I add your blog rocks!
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Thanks for the information on the free software. I d/loaded it, and it works wonderfully!
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My pleasure, and thanks for dropping by.
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The software was great! Thanks for the helpful information
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My pleasure! Glad it helped.
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GREAT!! I found how to back-up my blog on blogger!
I knew you’d written about it MANY times! Teri
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Good, comfortable site.
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Good site! Successes in future
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Hello, excellent site, very rich in content and carefully thought out
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good site. it was very interesting to read
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Hello, for your good site! Interesting design
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Hello I am a Soviet that I called on this site. I very like it here.
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Just stumbled on this one… And the software is still out there and works well!
I added another “layer” to this by using OPENRSM CloudBackup on my PC (and my wifes MAC and son’s Ubuntu) systems. That way I have a backup I can get to from the web, the helper application, or even mounted as a network disk.
That way if my web host goes down I’ve got it on my PC, if I mess stuff up and need to grab an older version I have it on my CloudBackup…
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[…] Last and perhaps most importantly, always make regular backups of your blog. I’ve written about this before so I won’t go into any detail except to say if the worst should happen you can always create […]
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