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 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).















I really hope people read this and take it to heart. I’m pretty consistent about backing things up, and it has saved me more times than I can remember. Now if you will excuse me, I’m on my way to back up my .org blog which I haven’t backed up since installing it on the 12th. [embarrassed grin]
Hi Richard,
Thus far 62 people have hit on that post and some seem to be clicking through using the download links. Hopefully, the majority hitting on the post will start using an offline editor. If so then we don’t have to hear the same people, who were negatively affected last time crying the blues on the forum again, the next time this happens.
@qarrtsiluni
Thank you so much for this tip. I edited the post to include it and sent a link your way for sharing. :)
There’s also BlogBackupOnline, free in beta, which does a daily backup of one’s blog from the RSS. https://www.blogbackuponline.com/techrigy/
I signed up after a month-old post suddenly disappeared.
Hi Jennifer,
Provided it’s working and sometimes it isn’t, here you go
to export links ->
http://justjennifer.wordpress.com/wp-links-opml.php
I also assumed Pages would not be included but the last time I imported there they were.
I’m feeling good about being helpful – thank you. :)
OK-I get the Exporting of the Posts, Comments, Categories, and Custom Fields (according to the Export tab). But where can I export my Blogroll? All I see in the WP.com Dashboard is the ability to Import an OPML file, which I did a million years ago from my Blogrolling account. (And I assume that Pages are not included in the Export XML file..?)
Ah-OK! All copied and pasted into EditPad. Thanks! :)
Thanks for this link. The hat tip is sailing through cyberspace to you now.
http://geekspin.net/?p=137 contains a neat little trick on how to back up a blog using gmail and feedberner in conjunction.
I’m glad you found the information useful. I hope you are keeping well and blogging like crazy. :)
So if I sub to my own RSS feeds, then will it also back up what’s already there? Your info is always amazing~thanks sooo very much for sharing your wisdom with those of us who just.don’t.have.it when it comes to computers…. (((((HUGS))))) sandi
How can I move it to other hosting. Currently are my content are in wordpress, while I want to moving my data to my new hosting site with fantastico enabled. Anyone could help? I’m a total noob.
There is an import and export function for this purpose in your 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. Best bet would be to assign the major category for them when you go to import them as you’re going to have to reassign them afterwards anyway.” (drmike on the wordpress.com forum)
Blogroll- 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.)
Open that exported blogroll (links) xml file in a plain text editor like NotePad and save as a *.txt file. Be sure you are using a plain ext editor and then import the *.txt file you saved into your new blog at dashboard -> blogroll -> import Links.
Important Note: The blogroll (links) xml file needs to be saved as a *.txt doc in a plain text editor like Notepad. 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 for what we’re doing here.
For all online backup, file sharing and storage related info, I recommend this website:
http://www.BackupReview.info
Thanks Jenny I’ve included the link and moved your comment to the correct post.
I discovered a Memopal (www.memopal.com) “cutting edge solution for online
backup”
They merged online backup, online storage and file sharing services into one product.
Thanks for the addition. :)
OoOh this article was published since a year ago. But the back up tips still valid in this time. What I’ve done is submit my own rss feed, that the easy way.
Btw, Thanks for the tips
Provided that your RSS feed it set to provide the whole posts then backing up by subscribing to your own RSS feeds is a good way to go. However, if your posts are set to “summary” to prevent blog scrapers from stealing them then you will not have complete copies, only excerpts. Moreover, RSS feed back-up does not provide back-ups of the comments, your custom fields or your blogroll. So at best it’s only a partial back-up.
Thank you SOOO much. I have spent hours today, making all of my links match on 3 of my sites. I still have 3 more to do, and this will save me so much time. This is the hardest topic to find on the WordPress Forums. I have searched for this many times, and just lucked out today to find a link to your site. Keep up the good work!
@twoblogger
IMO this is not the best course of action to take re: backups. Please be sure that your RSS feeds are set to “full” if that’s your backup plan and also remove any “more” tags in your posts as well.