Backing Up Your Blog

I've been blogging with Blogger for quite a while. I've never had any problems with it, but there is always that possibility. I hate to admit that I had never backed my blog up until very recently. I had more than a year's worth of posts and comments that I would hate to lose. I saved each archive page to my computer, which will give me the posts but not the comments.

Recently I found out about another option. I can import all my Blogger posts and comments to my Wordpress.com blog. I had signed up for a free account and created a blog a while ago, but I'm not really using it, so tonight I imported all of the posts from this blog. It was really simple and quick - of course, I don't have nearly as many posts on this blog as on my other one, so that one will probably take a bit longer. I will also have to change it to the New Blogger, at least long enough to get it backed up.

To back up your own blog - first, if you haven't already done so, sign up for a free account at Wordpress.com. Go ahead and create a blog there. You can have as many as you want - all for FREE. (I love free stuff!) Once you have a Wordpress.com blog, select your blog from the "My Dashboards" drop-down menu. Once on the blog dashboard, select "Manage" and there will be an option called "Import" - choose that. There are several options, for our purposes, and because that's what I did, choose "Blogger" and it will ask you for permission.

Howdy! This importer allows you to import posts and comments from your Blogger account into your WordPress blog.

To use this importer, you must have a Google account, an upgraded (New, was Beta) blog, and it must be on blogspot or a custom domain (not FTP).

The first thing you need to do is tell Blogger to let WordPress access your account. You will be sent back here after providing authorization.

Hit the "Authorize" button and grant access when Google asks. Once you authorize it, you will be taken back to Wordpress.com where you will see a list of your Blogger blogs. Select the blog you wish to import, and hit the "Import" button. Magically, all the posts and comments from that blog will be imported to your Wordpress.com blog! In the future, when you want to do a back-up, any posts and comments that have already been imported will be skipped.

How cool is that? Now, since it's a back-up, I will probably eventually set my Wordpress blog to private, because I don't really need duplicate content out there. What I do need is the peace of mind I get from knowing everything is backed up - just in case.