Backing Up Your Blog

After the discussion about creating disk backups I realized that I haven't been terribly diligent about backing up this blog. After all, what if Google should fail? Thousands of words of my deathless prose might be lost. (I know I've written some unforgettable things. Just last week I got three emails telling me how my posts had affected them. Only two mentioned nightmares.)

So how do you back up a Blogger blog?

One way to do it is to download the monthly archive HTML. The advantage to this is that everything in in HTML, and easy to read. But you have to remember to do it. I did, for a while, but haven't done it for some years. Sloth, I know.

But there is a way to download the whole blog:

1. Log onto your Blogger account.
2. Go to the Dashboard, if you're not there already.
3. Click Settings.
4. Click Export Blog.
5. Click the orange button.
6. A big file, ending in .xml, will appear in your download folder.

Note that the xml file is hard to read, but if you're moving your blog from one account to another it's the easy way to go. Also note that this does not save pictures or comments, those linked (the HTML archives don't save the pictures, either). So you'll have to find that stuff yourself.

This doesn't save your blogger template, either. To do that, go back to the dashboard, click Layout, then Edit HTML, and Download Full Template. Important if you have witty sayings embedded in you blog header.

Also note that either the HTML or XML backups are useful for searching your blog, because that Google search box in the upper left doesn't always find everything you've written.