How To Back Up Your Blog

You've been working hard on your blogs... brainstorming for ideas, spending hours doing the research, compiling your thoughts, and polishing your words... Surely you don't want all those efforts wasted due to unexpected circumstances like crashes, hacks, etc. Bad things do happen and they rarely let you know in advance. So set aside few of your precious minutes to get prepared for them by backing up your blogs.

Fortunately there are several free, fast and easy ways to do so. Here are what I have done so far to have a peace of mind.

1. If you use Blogger the easiest way comes with its setting.

You can activate the back up by email each time you publish new entry by entering your email in the BlogSend Address inside Email tab on your blogspot setting.

2. Use BlogBackUpOnline

This web-based back up is my favorite so far. You just need to sign up and add your blogs to the its dashboard. You can add as many blogs that you have but the quota on the free account only allows up to 50 MB of storage. To give an illustration, the current size of this blog you are reading only takes less than 1 MB of storage on their server.

You can have full back up once you have added your blogs to the list and then daily backups on scheduled time (that you can set) will back up new and modified entries.

This site also gives you an option to export the backups to your own computer.

3. Use Blogger Backup Utility freeware

This freeware from CodePlex provides a viable alternative to back up your blogs. The setting is straightforward: add your blogs, select drive location on your computer to save the XML files, save all entries as one file or one file for each post, etc. The only obvious difference with backing up using BlogBackUpOnline is that you have to do it manually... no automatic backup at scheduled time.

4. The last alternative works if your blog is hosted on new version of Blogger. I found this simple approach in an unofficial website about Google operating system. You can either display all your blog entries on the original format:
http://blogname.blogspot.com/search?max-results=1000

or on the XML feed format:
http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?max-results=1000

And to back up your comments:
http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default?max-results=1000

The number '1000' reflects the max number of posts you want to display. You can check the current number of your blog posts on the blog dashboard.

You can then save the output of either approach above to your computer. If you are more paranoid than most people, you can proceed further to Furl it to save them online for your back up of backups.