All three of my regular readers here use Blogger for their own blogs, so you might not be aware about the recent JournalSpace fiasco. Basically the folks at JournalSpace had a rather lousy backup procedure and lost all their users' data. Rather than trying to recover from this, they are simply shutting their doors (probably a wise move) and thousands of users are left without a trace of their blog.. Now I don't want to sound like your mom, but it might be a good time to learn from the misfortune of others and backup your own blog. I trust the integrity of the data I have stored with Google, but you just never know.
Fortunately making a backup of your Blogger blog is a pretty simple process. The first step is to export your blog itself. From your Blogger dashboard click on Settings which will automatically put you on the Basic settings tab. The first item on that page is Blog Tools and you will see three options: Import Blog - Export Blog - Delete Blog. Click on Export Blog. It may take a minute for this request to process, but after it does you will see a page with a button that says Download Blog. Click on that button ans save the file to you hard drive. The file it saves will be an XML file, and if you try to open it you'll just see a bunch of code, so the only way to use this file is to import it into Blogger should something ever happen to your blog. You may want to consider doing this every month or so.
The process above backs up all your posts and comments, but not your pictures. To back up your pictures you must have Picasa installed. Fortunately for you Mac users out there Picasa recently became available for OSX. After you have Picasa installed, make sure you're signed in to Blogger and then go to your Picasa Web Album. You may not have even known that you had one, but if you have a Blogger blog then you do. You should see an album with the name of your blog (it will have the little Blogger icon by it too). Click on the album and you'll see all the pictures you've ever posted to your blog. Above the pictures click on Download, then Download to Picasa.
That's it! Now you have all the elements of your blog saved to your computer. Hopefully you'll never need to use them, but it's nice to know you have everything just in case.
Posts
How God Put The Homeless in My Backyard
9 years ago
2 comments:
This is really great, Eric! Ben is always urging me to look into somehow saving my blog. I really would be bummed out to lose it. Thanks for the helpful info. I'll check into this.
Yeah, you never need backups until you need them. There's another tool that's supposedly working on being able to export your blog to a PDF so you could view then entire thing offline or make a book out of it. It would be nice to have tsomething more than an XML file. I'll let you know if I hear anything more about that.
Post a Comment