Do you back up your blogs?
How do you go about it?
I set each month up, do the old Ctrl+A (select all) Ctrl+C (copy) and then move to Microsoft Word, and then Ctrl+V (paste), and I save it as a MSWord document.
Tai recently had a hellacious week in which her blog completely disappeared. I can back her up on that, as I just happened to link to her blog this week (of which the disappearance had nothing to do with, I am sure). Two years of some damned good writing appeared to be down the drain, and I was nauseous for her.
But, voila! Her blog is back, thanks God. And what is the best measure for her, and us, to take, in case there is no miraculous recovery?
Input appreciated.
I'm so slack about backing things up...'cus I really ought to.
ReplyDeleteAnd considering this is the second 'scare' I've had you'd imagine I'd be more on top of it.
I suppose given the fact that I quit my job and I'm moving to a small island tomorrow I just kinda figured the blog needed updating too!
(but really? I'm glad that wasn't the case. I really like my blog!)
So. If anyone has any good and SIMPLE ideas, can you let us know?
Ta!
I use some sort of freeware called HTTrack Website Copier. I don't know what I'd do with the files if I ever needed them, but I have them just in case....
ReplyDeleteTake a look at http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=41447
ReplyDeleteNot perfect, but probably better than nothing.
Wow, that help.blogger link made my head spin. I may follow those instructions tomorrow though.
ReplyDeleteI've never backed up my blog and would hate to lose anything from it. I guess I'm being naive in thinking that it'll be fine regardless.
If I lost my whole blog - eh so what? I would probably quit blogging for a while, or longer, or not - who knows?
ReplyDeleteSimple? or EASY? Big difference you know.
Your template saves the format of your blog only and any customisations and additions to the sidebar etc. Your posts are stored on the Blogger servers and those notes on the link from Larry Jones are there in case you want to retrieve all your posts.
ReplyDeleteYour copying and saving is fine but you are better saving to a plain text file by using Notepad. If anything goes wrong, you can copy the template back without any Word formatting to stuff things up and things should look as rosy as before.
You could also start another blog elsewhere and import all of your old content.
ReplyDeleteI do exactly what you do! Then I copy it to a CD as well as my hard drive. I'm double anal...if that's possible.
ReplyDeleteI save each post as a .txt document on my hard drive. I also print them all.
ReplyDeleteI did lose my blog about a year ago, which was really untimely since it was right at the start of the voting for the Blog Awards. Blogger couldn't pull their heads out of their asses (despite being bombarded with umpteen bajillion requests) until I also started spamming them with copies of my blog from the Google cache. It took them about 3-4 days to restore it.
But, it is just a blog. If it died again I don't think I would continue it.
I save my template in a word file (but a plain text file is better), and I have all of my posts e-mailed to me. You can set that up in the "e-mail" tab of blogger - and it doesn't need to be the e-mail address you've associated with your blog, either.
ReplyDeleteIt's not a magic fix, but you've at least got everything.
Thanks to everyone for their input, here and in e-mail!
ReplyDeleteMmmmm... Double Anal....
ReplyDeleteOh. Uh...sorry, sorry.
That was just too funny to resist.
I know the pain of your friend. I lost three years' worth of an online journal (not my regular blog) because the host service died. They didn't have any backups--hundreds of people lost their journals. I was able to retrieve my template, my template images, and 38 entries using www.waybackmachine.org, the web archive. Somewhere, I found a utility that would back up from blogger, or maybe I followed the help page, or something, but I was able to download my entire A_L blog. I forget now how I did it. But if all else fails, there's waybackmachine.org--if your blog is set to be crawled by webcrawlers. If not, you'll probably be SOL.
ReplyDeleteWas your friend's blog on Blogger? They've been having some hiccups since they are doing this Beta Blogger thing.
There's a Blogger help group on Google groups.
Also, don't just back up to your hard drive. I had a hard drive die in 2004, and lost several years' worth of stuff because I hadn't backed up, and just last week, my (new) hard drive would only boot into safe mode.
You can never have too many backups. :) I'll shut up now.
Blogger has a feature that e-mails each new posting to a designated e-mail account. So every post I make is sent to my AIM account. Just the text, no pics. I save all my pics on my harddrive and try to copy that file to a CD once a month. Each day's posting has its own subfile within a monthly file, which is in an annual file.
ReplyDeleteI save my template by cc&p and e-mail it my "Paradise Driver" g-mail account once a month.
Basically, I can recover about 99% of what is posted but recreating the entire blog would be a real pain in the ass.