ON BLOGGING ~ The Back Up Plan...

Image courtesy Suburbanslice via Flickr

We are headed out of town for a long weekend to see the Sox play the Phillies in Philadelphia this weekend.  Woo-hoo!!!  What does this have to do with Blog Tips you ask?  Well, just as we make sure our affairs are in order before heading to the airport, we take steps to secure our information on the blog by doing a quick backup.

It is wicked easy to run a backup on Blogger.  I don't have any idea how to do this on WordPress but I imagine it is just as simple via a similar process.  Here's all it takes to give you peace of mind that things will be retrievable if Blogger has a melt-down:

1. Log in to your blog
2. Select the Settings link from your Dashboard
3. From the Basic tab which is where you will land, at the very top is a section called Blog Tools
4. Click on Export Blog
5. Click on the Export Blog button
6. A pop-up window will open asking you if you want to Open or Save - click the Save button
7. Within the pop-up window, pick the location on your computer or external drive that you want the back-up stored and then click Save
8. Wait until the process completes and the window closes - it should only take a minute
9. Go to the location that you saved the back-up to, open it up and you will see your template, all of your blog posts, and the comments

You can use this info. to import your blog to another provider or to re-install it back onto your Blogger blog if there is ever a system issue.  It is important to note that this backup will NOT save any images.  Relying on Blogger for your photo storage is a bad idea.  You should always store your photos or other images elsewhere so you can view and share them any time.

Now we can travel with ease, knowing if something breaks we can still put our blog back together.  We might be Bumbles, but every now and then we preserve something rather than crashing into it.