How to Back Up Your Blogger Blog

Donna asked:

Hi mel, sorry this is a totally off-topic question, it's just that you seem much more technically minded than me! Do you / can you save your blog, other than just publishing here? It's just that i'm thinking i'd like to keep a copy? I guess I could wordprocess each entry and save to disk, but that seems like extra work? don't know if i can post an entry then save it??

It's not off-topic at all, Donna. It's relevant to this month's Start A Blog challenge. Backing up your blog (in other words saving a copy) is a very good idea. Backups are always a good idea - you all back up all the files on your computers regularly, don't you? Of course you do. Imagine how terrible it would be to lose all your data, all you photos and music and email contacts and all the other other important things you store on your computer. I shudder to think about it.

How to back up your blog varies from blog host to blog host. I can't be an expert in everything, so if you have a Wordpress or Livejournal or any other kid of blog, you'll have to Google for "back up a wordpress/livejournal/whatever blog" and find out how to do it yourself. But I know how to back up a Blogger blog, because that's what type Bean Sprouts is.

Back Up All Your Past Blogger Posts in One Go

Here's one way. Go to:

http://blogname.blogspot.com/search?max-results=N

But put in your own blog's name instead of "blogname" and the number of entries in your blog instead of N. For example to date Bean Sprouts has 782 posts (including this one) so you see all Bean Sprouts posts in one place if you go to:

http://bean-sprouts.blogspot.com/search?max-results=781

(Warning - it takes a while to download. Don't even think about it if you're a dialup user). Hit File - Save As in your browser window and you can save the whole lot either as a .html (web page), a .txt (text file) or a .mht (web archive file).

To save the photos you can use DownThemAll as long as you are a Firefox user. It's a nifty tool that lets you download all the files with a certain extension from the current page. So when you're viewing the web page with all your blog posts on it, you can download all the .jpgs in one stroke and save them on your hard drive.

(From Google Operating System Blog).

Keep your Backups Up To Date

But what about the article you post tomorrow, and the one after that. Do you have to go through this process once a week to keep your archive up to date? You could. Or you could get Blogger to send every post to your email address, and then save all the emails.

Log on to your Blogger account and go the the dashboard of your blog. Click on Settings. Click on Email and then enter your email address in the Blogsend window. You might be able to set up your email software to automatically save all your blogsend emails to the same file. It depends what email software you're using. I really can't be an expert in everything.

Save Your Template

That method backed up all your text and photos. It would still be a real pain if Blogger somehow lost all your data, or if you accidentally deleted it yourself. It would take a long time to restore everything from the files you had, and you would have to reset your template and settings. So back those up too.

Log onto your blogger account and go the the dashboard of your blog. Click on Layout. Then click on Edit HTML. Don't be scared. You can't break anything if you don't change anything. At the top of the page it says:

Before editing your template, you may want to save a copy of it. Download Full Template.

Click Download Full Template. A window will appear asking if you want to download or save the file. Click Save. Tell it where you want to save it to, and hit Save.

Wouldn't It Be Nice If

Wouldn't it be nice if Blogger gave us a simple way to back up all our posts so we could easily restore our blogs if we accidentally deleted them, or if Blogger somehow lost them? That'd be really nice, but as far as I know it doesn't exist. Are you listening Blogger?