Backing Up Your Blog
If you've spent a few years posting articles to your blog, imagine how you'd feel if you lost all that work. We're talking about a serious chunk of any bloggers life here as these things can eat into your very soul.
Now I'd expect any blog hosting service that charges for the privilege would have a backup regime in place to safeguard your data but it's worth checking the small print just in case. However, if you use one of the many free services as I do, then it's a good bet that they provide no guarantee as to the availability of your data.
So how do you back up your blog? Well, some systems like WordPress and TypePad allow you to export the content so you can back up the data yourself. This is also useful for moving your blog to another service but having to export your data regularly is a chore and so there has to be a better way. Luckily, there is…
BlogBackupOnline is a free service, for the moment, that gives you 50Mb of storage space and it automatically backs up you blog on a daily basis so there's no need for you to do anything else once you've registered it. 50Mb might not sound much but bear in mind that this doesn't include any image, video or other related external content so you can get a awful lot of HTML code into 50Mb.
Once the blog is registered, a full backup is taken of all entries. After being registered, BlogBackupOnline performs a daily incremental backup to find new entries, new comments, and other changed content.
Full or daily backups can be run manually at any time and it also has the added bonus of letting you export your backed up content to your own hard drive so, if your blog service doesn't have an export facility, then you can use this one. On top of all this, it keeps a backup log and you can browse through the backup content and access the history of each post as it keeps every version it finds when it does its daily backups. In other words, changes that may have been made to the blog are not over-written when the blog is backed up. If a change is made to an entry and you need to access a prior version, then you can retrieve it through the history link.
A backup isn't much use without a means of restoring the data after the server, or whatever broke, is running again so BlogBackupOnline allows you to upload the content of your backed up blog to an existing or even to a new blog and you can restore a single blog entry, comment, or the entire blog.
Another option is BackupMyBlog. Again, this one is free for the moment and you get 10Mb of space but it only backs up MySQL based blogs and it needs to be installed on the blog server. Not much use for most of us but there are folk out there with their own blog servers.
Now I'd expect any blog hosting service that charges for the privilege would have a backup regime in place to safeguard your data but it's worth checking the small print just in case. However, if you use one of the many free services as I do, then it's a good bet that they provide no guarantee as to the availability of your data.
So how do you back up your blog? Well, some systems like WordPress and TypePad allow you to export the content so you can back up the data yourself. This is also useful for moving your blog to another service but having to export your data regularly is a chore and so there has to be a better way. Luckily, there is…
BlogBackupOnline is a free service, for the moment, that gives you 50Mb of storage space and it automatically backs up you blog on a daily basis so there's no need for you to do anything else once you've registered it. 50Mb might not sound much but bear in mind that this doesn't include any image, video or other related external content so you can get a awful lot of HTML code into 50Mb.Once the blog is registered, a full backup is taken of all entries. After being registered, BlogBackupOnline performs a daily incremental backup to find new entries, new comments, and other changed content.
Full or daily backups can be run manually at any time and it also has the added bonus of letting you export your backed up content to your own hard drive so, if your blog service doesn't have an export facility, then you can use this one. On top of all this, it keeps a backup log and you can browse through the backup content and access the history of each post as it keeps every version it finds when it does its daily backups. In other words, changes that may have been made to the blog are not over-written when the blog is backed up. If a change is made to an entry and you need to access a prior version, then you can retrieve it through the history link.
A backup isn't much use without a means of restoring the data after the server, or whatever broke, is running again so BlogBackupOnline allows you to upload the content of your backed up blog to an existing or even to a new blog and you can restore a single blog entry, comment, or the entire blog.
Another option is BackupMyBlog. Again, this one is free for the moment and you get 10Mb of space but it only backs up MySQL based blogs and it needs to be installed on the blog server. Not much use for most of us but there are folk out there with their own blog servers.
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