If you have a blog hosted on Blogspot and you’ve upgraded to the new version, there’s an easy way to backup your blog.
This page lists the latest N posts from the blog:
http://blogname.blogspot.com/search?max-results=N
Instead of N, type the number of posts. If your blog has less than 1000 posts, you can save this page:
http://blogname.blogspot.com/search?max-results=1000
To download all the photos uploaded to your blog, DownThemAll comes to the rescue. The Firefox extension lets you download all the files with a certain extension from the current page, so it’s a good way to download all the images from the previous listing.
There’s also a way to get all the posts in an XML feed. This is a better format if you intend to import it in a database.
http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?max-results=1000
The number of posts can be easily obtained from the dashboard.
You can also backup the comments:
http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default?max-results=1000
BackupMyBlog is a new service (in public beta) that will automatically back up blogs daily (I love the heavy use of green in the design). This is a much needed tool. Wordpress, which is what we use for all of the TechCrunch blogs, has this feature built in, but inexplicably doesn’t backup images - so we do backups manually instead (and often forget for a day).
BackupMyBlog backups are fully redundant on two separate servers in two locations, so its extremely unlikely you’ll lose your main blog as well as both backups. However, the service has a 10 mb limit - something I don’t like - and older post backups are deleted as that limit is reached. Hopefully they’ll have options for more storage once the service is out of beta. Brian Benzinger has done a full test of the service and likes most aspects of it.
Most hosted blogs won’t be able to use the product - you must be able to add a PHP script on your blog server. If you are hosting your blog yourself, though, you should be using this or otherwise backing up your data.
The product is free during its beta period. No word on pricing after that.
This is the kind of thing I’d expect Feedburner to be doing.
Creating backups of your blog is like drinking water. You know you should do it at regular intervals, but often times other activities get in the middle and you just forget about it.
The possible consequences of not backing up your blog, however, are much more serious than missing the middle-morning water glass. Should your server crash for some reason, or your website get hacked, you will lose valuable data.
Personally, I try to backup all my websites weekly (but I am lazy, so if you have time you can even do it daily!). Below you will find a quick checklist for backing up your blog.
- Use an FTP client to download all the site files (the Wordpress folder)
- Log into phpMyAdmin and select your Wordpress database
- Click on “Export” and make sure that all the Wordpress tables are there
- On the “Structure” section tick “Add Drop Tables,” “Add AUTO_INCREMENT,” and “Enclose table and field names with backquotes”
- On the “Data” section leave all the boxes unticked
- Tick “Save as file” and download the database (you can use compression if your database is big)
If you don’t have access to phpMyAdmin, you can use the Wordpress Database Backup plugin.
I have a fellow blogging friend that has had an issue with his WordPress blog, turns out a plugin totally messed up 2 years of posts and things went down hard. The backup plugin was a gonner, so was the other backup program (it had stopped backing up month before). We spent many of hours trying to recover his site, and eventually returned his site close to what he had before. The whole ordeal had me thinking that maybe another external backup wouldn’t be so bad for my own site. So I went searching and found BlogBackupOnline. Their site is deceivingly simple and can backup everything from posts, pictures, comments, and code. It does a daily backup of your content for free as long as you are lighter than 50mb. Its secure and better still a remote backup, so if something goes awry with you backup solution you can lean on BlogBackupOnline.
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