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Sunday, May 15, 2011

Do your backup: A day after Blogger is down

I'm writing this post to remind everyone using Blogger to do a backup of all your posts.

2 days ago, Blogger was down and I was unable to login. Yesterday when it was back again, I login to find out that some of my most recent comments were gone and some of the recent edits to my posts were also missing. I was lucky that the damage was not too much. I read through my blog lists and find that everyone using Blogger was affected. I hope no one suffer huge damage.

The first thing I did is to do a backup of all my posts. I did this once in a while, but sometimes I didn't because I either forget, ignore it, or thinking that "nothing will happen, no need to do backup". Before you regret, please do your backup NOW.

This is the way I usually do backup. It takes only a minute to do.

1) From your Dashboard, click "Settings". You will see a page like this (see below).

2) Under Blog Tools, click "Export blog". You will be asked to save your blog as a .xml file in your hard drive. Click "Download blog" to save. And you are done!


3) If let's say you want to load your saved blog, under Blog Tools, click "Import blog", select the .xml file, everything will be back to the point of time you have saved it.

4) If you want to try the above (import blog), I suggest you create a dummy blog to do it, just in case you do damage to your blog. Just create a new blog, import blog and see if everything is back. You can delete this dummy blog after "experimenting". If you want to keep your dummy blog, remember to set "Permissions" to "Only Blog authors" can view, so that we will see not duplicate blogs. :)

Note: Please note that you can only backup all your posts, pages and comments using the above method. It cannot save the design and layout of your blog. The contents of your side bars will not be saved. Let me know if you know how to do it.

If you have better ways of backing up a blog, please share with us, cos I'm not very good at this.