Backup Your Blog

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