Disaster Planning: Backups for Bloggers

There’s nothing more frustrating than discovering that all the time and energy you put into blogging a post was for nothing. Suppose you clicked the “save” or “publish” button and the post went sailing into cyberspace but was not captured in the database. It’s forever gone and now you must re-construct it.

The Long Shot
If you do have a post or page that appears to have sailed off into cyberspace you may get lucky. Perhaps it did get into the database. Look in your admin section to see if it was saved as a “draft” or as a “private” post (or page).

• -> Dashboard -> Manage -> Posts (or Pages)
• Next look for the -> Status button and click it.
• The drop down menu choices are:
• Any, Published, Draft and Private.
• Select “Any” and “Any” date and then click “Filter” and look for your post.
• Perhaps you will get lucky and find it or perhaps not.

The Safe Bet - Use an Offline Blog Editor
The time to backup your posts is while you are writing them. The best method of doing so is to use an offline blog editor to compose your posts in and to publish the posts directly into your blog.

Using an off-line blog editor, rather than posting directly into the editor on any blogging platform provides advantages. Here are just three of them that will be of interest to wordpress.com bloggers:

(1) You can avoid all the woes that come with losing your post after you press “publish” or “save” and find that the post or page did not make it into the database as you will have a back-up copy.

(2) You can avoid the woes that result from accidental deletion as well.

(3) And you can avoid all the woes that come with copying and pasting text laden with “unique” formatting code like those found in Microsoft Word. Special note for wordpress.com bloggers - see icon 16 f - paste from Word.

There are many free offline editors available and other that you must purchase and you will find the download links for them in this Offline Editors Review.

Raincoaster’s Copy/Paste Work Around
If you are not using an offline blog editor and instead you are composing your post on the wordpress editor (Tiny MCE) then you can take this precaution as you write.

• Highlight all of the post (Control A on windows) and copy it to the clipboard (Control C) and, while everything was still highlighted, click “Publish”.
• Even if you lose the post, you’ll still have it on the clipboard and it’s the work of a moment to do another.

Subscribe to Your Blog’s RSS Feeds
By subscribing to the rss feeds to your blog and setting them on “full” feed you will have a back-up of every post you publish and every comment posted. If you also wish to backup the images in posts there are different rss feed reader services to consider as only some include them.

There’s also BlogBackupOnline, free in beta, which does a daily backup of one’s blog from the RSS. Hat tip to Qarrtsiluni

And Jenny has supplied another online blog backup service as well called Back-upReview .

Periodically Export Backup Copies and Save them to Disc
You can export the posts, comments, categories and pages out of one wordpress.com blog and import them into another wordpress.com blog with ease. This does include any images or other uploads - you have to do that manually. And the links must be exported and imported separately.

There is an import and export function in your wordpress dashboard
-> dashboard -> manage -> export -> wordpress

(1) You can export the contents of your blog (posts, comments, categories) in the form of an xml file to your desktop and then import the xml file into the other blog site.

(2) The blogroll links must be separately exported and re-categorized. That means you will have to re-assign them to each link but it’s better than copying and pasting those links yet again.

Quick note about the blogroll. The OPML format doesn’t support categories even though they’ll be there when you do the export. The best bet choice is to assign the major category for them when you go to import them as you’re going to have to reassign them afterwards anyway. If you had links, you can export them out at
http://mydomain.com/wp-links-opml.php (You must change “my domain” to your own url, of course.)

Important Note: The blogroll (links) xml file needs to be saved as a *.txt doc in a plain text editor like Notepad or one those found in Free Plain Text Editors. This is because if you were to save it as a text rich text document using for example Microsoft Wordpad or Word (horrors!) those programs would add in all kinds of garbage like fonts and unusual html formatting code that mess will it up.

How to backup your blog using Feedburner and Gmail - “Subscribe to my Feedburner email subscription with a Gmail address that includes a label that will be automatically filtered to my archives when it comes in. Using your Feedburner email subscription, any new posts you publish will automatically be sent to your subscribers. Hat tip to Netty Gritty. Add yourself in with your normal Gmail address plus a label, i.e. Aseem1234+blogbackup@gmail.com and have it filtered to your archives! Viola! Now your entire posts will be emailed to you and saved in your Google account whenever you publish.” -> Read more here

KaTeker, the backup tool for Linux

KaTeker is a backup tool for Linux useful for small companies and private people. It saves data onto hard disks and CDs, DVDs or other random access media. It is is designed to manage the backup of data of daily work.

Ignis backup tool for Linux

Ignis is a special backup program for the SOHO sector. It implements a full-backup strategy, a mix between the backup schemes of GFS and Tower of Hanoi. It is meant for backing up onto DVDs or simular media. Normally, it is called via cron to perform the backups and checks. Reports are sent via mail. The ignis project is licensed under the GPL (v2 or later).