Blog Tipz

There are dozens of ways that you can go about backing up your blog, with most of them involving a manual process – entering into FTP mode, then selecting files you want to backup either online or offline.  The process eventually adds up to hundreds of hours of downtime that should be spent promoting or adding new content to your blog.  Nonetheless, backing up your blog is an essential part of the everyday cycle, as you never know when your hard drive, server’s hard drive, or some other “natural” event will happen.  

I want to provide a brief introduction into tools that do not involve adding plugins directly to your blog, instead sites that have been created to help make the process simpler, that allow you some control over the often grueling process of downloading all your files.  

Blog Backup Online

The first tool is Blog Backup Online (invalid security certificate in Firefox 3?), which was created and is now maintained Techrigy, Inc. since 2006.  As per the homepage, the steps are fairly simple to use the service: 1) Sign up, 2) Register your blog, 3) Your blogs are automatically backed up daily.

In addition to the clean and organized look of the site, the process of adding a blog to the site is fairly painless, and was done in about as many steps as the main page stated.  The service provides full support for Blogger (Blogspot) and WordPress (both the self-hosted and managed versions).  Limited support is provided for other platforms such as TypePad, LiveJournal, Serendipity, Windows Live Spaces, Movable Type, Friendster, Terapad, and Vox.

Pricing: “Freemium”: Backup unlimited number of blogs, run backups daily, 5MB storage
“Professional”: $4.17 per month or $49.95 per year, restore your blog, backup images linked from blog, 250MB storage
“Enterprise”: $8.30 per month or $99.95 per year, restore your blogs, bakckup images linked from blog, 1GB storage 

Backups: Posts, comments, categories, and tags.  Does not backup user accounts, the database, or posts not publicly available.

Additional Features: 128-bit security encryption key for physical and electronic security.

Additional Links: Pricing | Terms of Service | User Guide | Blog | Privacy Policy | About

Blog Backupr

Blog Backupr is a newer service, with a domain registered in January of this year.  The service works by using the RSS feed of your blog and full posts, comments, pages, and categories, as well as media files such as JPEG, ZIP, etc. if you are using WordPress (.com or .org) and Blogger (Blogspot).  Other blog systems can use it, but must use the “Export” function, with word on more support for other systems in the future.

Additional Links: Blog | FAQ | Privacy Policy 

Specific Information

Below are some useful links if you have never backed up your blog before and are using one of the popular blog systems.

• Blogger – How do I create a backup of my entire blog?
• WordPress.org Backups
• TypePad – Backing Up Your Content
• WordPress.com – use Export to XML file
• Movable Type – Backup/restore your MySQL database

Conclusion

While these appear to be good services (each requires a RSS feed as the standard), it is always recommended that you keep backups of your data in multiple places, on your computer, removable media, and alternative secure online storage services.  Your time and effort put into your sites is more important than money can buy, in many cases, and you don’t want to lose that time.

This is a reminder that this is a short look at automatic backup solutions, as some people may prefer the manual methods, but a majority of people would rather use a service or plugin that can automatically gather all information in a few simple steps rather than lengthy methods that require backing up each individual SQL database table.