Monday, November 5, 2012

For Blog Owners: How to Back-up Your Blog


Re-posted by request:

We have a great deal of time and effort in our Blogs and everyone who has a Blog dreads the day that your Blog, all or in part ‘disappears’.

For several years I followed Granny Miller’s Blog. She was great at Blogging with her pictures and detail about her farm, canning, gardening and how she lived the self-reliant life. I learned a great deal from her. Well, the worst happened to her. She lost her Blog and did not have a complete back-up copy. Years of priceless information gone forever!

Fortunately, there is a very easy way to backup and save your entire Blog. 

In your Blog's control panel, if you click and open the Settings Tab you will see a Blog Tools section, click on that tab. It will open another window and you will see an option to Import Blog, Export Blog and Delete Blog. Clicking on the ‘Export Blog’ will allow you to save a copy of the entire contents of your Blog to your computer. A drop down window will allow you to pick where you want to save the file. It’s very simple to use this feature.

(Import Blog will allow you to restore your Blog should it become corrupted or lost by simply using your saved back-up copy)



Another great feature for Bloggers!

http://blogbooker.com The service this site provides is free. It takes your back-up copy of your Blog and converts it to a PDF in a book format with all the pictures.

The PDF is organized by date just like your Blog is written and with a table of contents allows you to pick a single article you may be looking for and open it.

The PDF is in a book printing layout. My file is large at 22meg and 630 pages. So printing or e-mailing isn’t really practical but it is fun to have or pass around on a CD.

Note, you can not use this PDF to restore your Blog. You must save the .xml back-up copy for that.

21 comments:

  1. This is exactly the kind of information I need as I couldn't figure out a good way to save my blog to computer files so that I could see which photos go with which post, etc. Do you have a recommendation as to how often to save, and do you do subsequent saves to the same file name so you only have the latest version? I enjoy your blog and have shared it with a few people.

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  2. Thanks for the reminder! I did it the last time you posted about it, guess it's time again :)

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  3. Thanks Mike, I know this will help many people.

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  4. Joyful

    How often to save? I guess that depends on how often you post articles. If like myself where I average 1-2 a week, plus I also save each posting in a dedicated file, then every two months is fine. This way you would only lose 2 months of work. If you’re a heavy poster then once a month or more often would be better.

    When I back-up I create the name the folder including the date of the back-up and after it’s backed-up and verified it’s complete and then delete the older back-up. Also I used a thumb drive to save the back-up on because of the size of the file. CD’s can’t hold that much data and if my computer crashes I won’t lose the blog back-up.

    The Blogger back-up feature is pretty basic in that it’s all or nothing. In other words you can’t select certain topics or select certain months, it only saves in calendar sequence of dates, the same sequence the articles were posted. This is great if Blogger loses your file and you need to restore the entire blog.

    Hope this helps!

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  5. I also placed a recommendation and referral on my blog to your blog my friend.

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  6. Mike,
    Thanks for the tip. I will surely be backing up my blog. This is important for me because I have not been blogging regularly and wouldn't even know if I lost my blog!

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  7. Thank you so much for your thoughts on this. I can really use the suggestions and will bookmark this post.

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  8. Rose, you’re welcome, a simple thing but will save a lot of heartache if you lost your blog.

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  9. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  10. I clicked on over from Sandy's. I've been wondering how to back up my blog, especially with Blogger bugging me for a cell phone number. I don't have a cell phone and am concerned if they ever make this a requirement, I'll be locked out of my blog permanently. Excellent information. Much appreciated.

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  11. Thanks for this tip. I went immediately to my blog and made a backup before even commenting.

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  12. Leigh,
    You never know about Blogger, I've had several people I know, have their blog shut down without warning. At least with your backup you can go to Wordpress and transfer everything.

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  13. Kristine,
    Smart thing to do and it's so simple. What a disaster it would be to lose everything you've worked so hard at.

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  14. Not exactly a true disaster  here’s the real story…..
    At the time I accidently destroyed my website in July 2010, I was caring for a very, very ill family member. The loss of my website in those days was the least of my worries.
    To be honest I had grown tired of blogging, the Internet and I was planning to retire GRANNY MILLER without an archive at the end of 2010. I could have easily retrieved my website if I had really wanted to – but I didn’t want to. Frankly it seemed like one more thing to do and another mess to clean up. I was positively exhausted and overwhelmed by worry and endless hospital drama and screw ups.
    I truly viewed the loss of my website as an act of Providence -I needed a rest and I sure got it.
    Life without the Internet and email can be a good and productive life. I totally enjoyed my time away for it. It’s taken me over 16 months to get around to facing the file & data disaster that I accidently created in July 2010.
    An email recently from an old reader gave me some pause for consideration about restoring GRANNY MILLER. The dubious gift of early morning insomnia due to hurricane Sandy (I have children & grandchildren living in Manhattan) afforded me plenty of uninterrupted indoor time to start cleaning up my file mess.
    I’m not sure in what direction I’m taking the new GRANNY MILLER. But I thought it may be of interest to some that I’m putting a part of my work back online. I’m not sure what direction I’ll take the new GRANNY MILLER – but she’s up at least until Halloween 2013.

    I’m glad I’ve been able to help other bloggers by being a bad example.
    All the best to you,
    Katherine Grossman – aka – Granny Miller

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  15. MIke,
    I was wondering, do you have to back your blog up everyday or when you post, or does it keep up to date with your postings so everything you post is backed up?

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  16. I pay for a daily file & data back up with my hosting service :-)
    All the best,
    K.Grossman

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  17. Katherine,
    We all hope the family member illness has turned out well.

    Thanks for the comment that explains what really happened. Blogging is supposed to be enjoyable, but when you pressure yourself to post on a schedule and constantly try to create better articles begins to consume all your free time and yes, it can get overwhelming.

    I actually feel privileged that you took the time to post your comments here! You and your husband set the goal for my eventual self-reliance lifestyle. I always looked forward to your postings as very helpful and a trusted learning experience.

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  18. Rose,
    You can back-up as often as you like, once a day, once a week, once a month or whenever you want. Blogger never stores any of your postings on their servers. Only you can save them. Your blogger back-up is only to your computer so you need to do the back-up on a regular basis to save all you have posted.
    When I post I have already assembled the post on Word with the pictures and save that as a file for my own back-up use. I normally back-up once a month.

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