Monday, January 26, 2009

Blogger Backup

Quite a while ago I mentioned that I used the import feature at Wordpress.com to back up my blog. I haven't been doing it regularly, like I should be, but I thought that would be good enough for blog backup. Today, though, I was trying to back up my other blog, after not having done it for several months. Right in the middle of importing, it just stopped, and wouldn't go any further. When I attempted to view the blog in a new tab to see how many posts had actually transferred, I got an error message telling me the blog had been archived or suspended due to TOS violations. Since I wasn't even really using the blog as a blog, merely transferring posts as a backup, I'm not sure what I supposedly did. If they don't want me to use it as backup, they shouldn't provide the import feature.

Whatever - forget Wordpress. I went searching for a better way to back up my blogs and found this handy little tool - Blogger Backup. It makes it really easy to back up your blogs. Sign into Blogger, and it finds all your blogs. Then you just select the blog you want to backup from the list, decide how you want your files named, whether you want each post to be a file or just one file with all posts. You can get the lastest 10, 25, 50, 100 posts, or just download them all, or you can specify a date and time and only download new posts since that date. Since it was my first time using it, I backed up all my posts, and then I can just backup all the new ones in the future.

There's also an option to restore posts, which worked on my test blog, but I keep getting an error message when I try to restore a post here. I noticed in the discussion that some other people have had the same problem, so hopefully there's a fix in the works. I'm wondering if it has something to do with using Custom Domain instead of a blogspot url, but that's just a guess.

Then, as I'm writing this post, Zemanta suggested the following article, and I found out that Blogger now has the option to export and import your blog, so I could have just backed up straight from my Dashboard. I guess I should look at it more, and read Blogger Buzz to keep up with things, huh?




What I'm really saying here is - no matter how you do it, be sure and back your blog up. Hopefully you'll never need the backup, but if you ever do - you'll be glad you did it.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Extremely sound advice! I'm a huge wordpress fan though - but blogger or wordpress, backing up is crucial! Thanks for the reminder!

Anonymous said...

If you're running your own Windows server with MySQL or any other ODBC-compatible database, you could create a backup yourself, for example with Handy Backup. Works fine for me...

Rumah esha said...

You have a wonderfull blog. Thanx

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