A Blogger BackUp Tool

Posted by Mrs. Mecomber

August 4, 2008

You’ve heard it said again and again and AGAIN. Lose the weight or get on diet pills. No no– kidding! What you’ve really heard it said over and over again is always BACK UP YOUR BLOG! This is so important. A fellow blogger recently lamented that she tried to update to Wordpress 2.6, but something went wrong with the installation. She tried to revert back to an older version of Wordpress, but wiped out her entire blog with hundreds of posts. OUUUUCH. So I’m going to say it again–

ALWAYS BACK UP YOUR BLOG!

I try to back mine up every week, and/or after a really big post that I’ve spent a lot of time on. It’s good to back up your MySQL data if you host your own blog (and you can backup all your posts and comments through Wordpress itself by going to “Manage” and then “Export.”). But what if you have a Blogger blog?

There’s a way to back up your template– I posted about it here. But backing up your template does not back up your posts and comments. There are three things you can do here. You can:

1) Copy and paste all your posts html and all the comments in a word document file and save all this on your hard drive. This is very time consuming and labor-intensive.

2) You can create a new blog for free at Wordpress.com. They allow you to export your Blogger posts and comments there. You can make the blog private so that you do not have duplicate content on the web. And everytime you update a new post, you can export the new stuff there again.

3) You can download and use the software program Blogger Backup. It’s free but it is a little complex to use. Read the instructions carefully.

What do I use? Well, for my Blogger blogs I have used a combination of #2 and #3.

Backingup your blogs is another job. It does take effort to maintain your blogs if you want to run a serious and professional site. But an hour spent in making backups is three days saved in frustration and crying. So go backup your blogs!