Important - How to Back Up Your Blog

Earlier this week a fellow blogger had her blog disappear completely.  No rhyme or reason why.... Just POOF and it was gone.  How the heck does that happen???  It got me to thinking, what would I do if my blog disappeared?  I do have a back up of my template, but absolutely nothing backed up on any of my posts.  Having to recreate them would be nearly impossible.  I felt so sorry for her!  I hate that she had to go through not knowing if she would ever see her data, all that hard work again.  She had over two years of work and so many amazing posts that she now had no control over.  She didn't know where it all went.  When she tried to access her blog, it said "does not exist".  Her blog actually disappeared for over 24 hours, but thank God it somehow finally came back.  There was no explanation from blogger as to why it disappeared or how it came back up.  All she knows is that it did.

It turns out that there is a way to export and save a copy of your entire blogger blog, which includes the posts.  Once she found out how, she posted the information for the rest of us.  I wanted to share her story and the great blog back up information with you.  Once I found out via her post how easy it actually is to export my entire blog to my computer, I felt so much better about my blog.  Hopefully something like what happened to her won't ever happen again, but knowing that there is a back up on my computer definitely makes me feel more confident knowing that should something like this happen to me, I have options.

Here are the instructions how to save a copy of your entire Blogger blog:

Via the blogger interface (dashboard)

Click on “Settings” (on the left hand side), 

then click “Other” (also on the left side), 

see near the top where it says BLOG TOOLS,

right next to that Click “Export blog”

Then click "download blog"

A copy will save to your computer downloads file 

I like to open my downloads file and make a copy of the Blog File

(it is easy to find since it is named and dated = "BLOG - xx/xx/12")  

I put a copy of it in a folder I've named blog Backups.

I like to back it up every couple of weeks.