Protecting Your Blog
In the Twitter traffic reporting on the Blogger Summit at the SCGS Jamboree, there was a discussion about losing the contents of your blog. All bloggers are at the mercy of their service – either a hosted blog or one you manage yourself through an Internet service provider. Fortunately, we do have options – and simple ones at that – to keep a local copy of our blog content just in case disaster strikes.
The big three blog services, and most of the smaller ones, have import and export features as part of their service. These are generally used if you want to move your blog from one platform to another. The export feature collects the contents of your blog and downloads a copy to your local computer. This file will be in some sort of XML format, depending on the blog platform you use. It’s not designed to be read by a human, but it does make sense to other blog systems.
An export generally doesn’t include any custom theme or plugin data, but it does include comments and metadata with the posts.
I’d recommend adding a blog export task to your backup calendar. How frequently do you need to backup your blog? That depends on how often you post. The more you post, the more often you should export a backup. Be aware too, that the more you post, the longer your export will take. It will be interesting to see how long it takes Randy Seaver to export his 3,000+ articles . . .
WordPress users who manage their own WordPress installation can choose to install the WordPress Database Backup plugin. This handy tool allows you to set up scheduled backups which will then email you a copy of your database at whatever interval you select. Granted, this doesn’t include uploaded images or documents, so an occasional export is still a good idea.
Whatever process you use, take the time to regularly save a copy of your blog. The time and effort you put into every post is more than worth the few minutes it takes to back them up.
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June 28th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
Great great post! I will link back to this for Data Backup Day which is coming up next week!
Thomas MacEntee