Backup Your Blog!

imageDo you have a blog?  I hope so! If you have more than just a few entries, you may have wondered, “what if something happens to files on the Internet?”  What if you tried to view your blog one day and it was blocked, or something was missing?  Or simply, what if you neglect your blog for a few years and then can’t find it?

We’ve been keeping the GeeksOnTour.blogspot.com blog since 2003 and we have nearly 2,000 posts!  This blog/journal is very precious to us – we would hate to lose it! So, how do we back it up?  Unfortunately, there is no one perfect way to back up a blog.  Because of its hybrid, multimedia, nature, you can’t get one backup that can do all things, so you need to know the purpose for your backup.

Different Backups for Different Purposes

  1. Restore your blog to the Blogger platform.  This would be necessary if, for some reason your whole blog got lost, deleted, or blocked.  Then you would want to be able to create a new blog and use your backup to Restore all the entries.  The only way to do this is if you used the “Export” feature of Blogger.com to export all the entries to a text file which can be later used for Importing to Blogger.
  2. Move or duplicate to another platform like WordPress.com.  You can use that same Export file to Import into WordPress.com.  I even do this when I don’t want to move to WordPress.com, I just want to see my blog in a separate place to know that I am safe.  I make the WordPress blog private – just as a backup.
  3. Save a copy of all posts, including pictures, in a way that can be viewed offline.  This is a very different proposition.  When you use the Export option above, all you’re getting is text – the text includes links to pictures that are stored elsewhere on the Internet.  If the picture is no longer located at that linkURL, then you will see a blank white box.  The special way to save everything, is to use a Browser command called Save Page As Webpage Complete.  I do this with my blog by month.  So, with one month’s worth of posts displayed on the screen, I use the Browser’s menu and chose Save page as ….  I leave it set as Webpage Complete, then choose a location on my USB External Hard Drive to store it.  The end result is HTML files that can be viewed offline and include all the text, sidebars, and .jpg pictures.
  4. 2014-04-29 11.30.04Be able to print the blog, including all pictures, without the Blogger header and sidebars.  Here is the easiest, most complete, and most long lasting method of preserving your blog …. make a book from it!  The website is www.Blog2Print.com and it is as easy as can be!  Just enter the URL address of your Blog (www.geeksontour.blogspot.com),  tell it the date range to print and what size to make the pictures, and they’ll do all the rest.  For roughly $75, you can get a beautiful hard-bound, full color, coffee table book of your Blog!  I look at mine all the time!  I have made two so far, one for 2004 and one for 2005.  My goal is to have a yearbook for each year we’ve been RVing.

If you are a Geeks on Tour member, you might want to watch these tutorial videos:

MrsGeek
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