WebDiggin.com: An Adventure to Make Money Online

We spent a lot of time today trying to find utilities to backup our blogs. It would have taken a lot more time trying to recreate the work in the event of an emergency, but it’s still frustrating to be spending time on “administrative” stuff, instead of creative stuff.

WordPress

The WordPress Plugin site offers many options for your backup and recovery needs. Unfortunately, a great deal of them didn’t work for me:

• WP-DB Manager installed okay, but when your database recovery system gives you a message that it can’t restore your backup, chances are you need to reconsider your options: “Database On ‘November 29, 2007 @ 11:11 pm’ Failed To Restore”. Plus, I couldn’t get the export to email function to work. Word on the net is there is some problems with this plugin anyways, as it doesn’t output a standard file.
• BackupWordPress, also listed in wordpress’s plugin directory didn’t want to work, either: “Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.”

So, we’re doing the head-ache method of using phpMyAdmin which typically comes provided with your database. Wordpress provides some pretty detailed instructions, as do other sites, but the hassle of having to manually go into phpMyAdmin to export the database is a hassle.

Fortunately, WordPress.org offers an alternative. Apparently there was a WordPress Database Backup Plugin originally bundled with WordPress, but discontinued after WordPress 2.1. It allows daily backups to your email. The file created is a standard SQL file. However, you’ll need to use phpMyAdmin to upload that file. (WordPress provides support for Restoring Your Database From Backup as well as a link to a visual tutorial for phpMyAdmin 2.5.3 which can be found at Podz’ WordPress Restore guide.) We tried it, and it works. So that’s what we’re sticking with right now.

Note: You still need an FTP program to download your files. (Backing up the database is only backing up the content. You’ll still need to back up your themes, images, etc.)

Blogger

Backing up blogger is a headache. Blogger’s official solution is to switch the template to a no-frills single page with all of your posts which you can then save. This method, however, doesn’t allow you to recover the data from the file. Most people posting solutions to backup your Blogger blog revolve around ways to copy the data (and/or images), but again not upload. This is a huge flaw. How can you recover from an accidental deleting or malicious attack?

We currently use Blogger Backup which, so far, is the only utility we can find that allows you to download and upload your blog posts. There are limitations, of course. It’s based on your public feed, so you need to make sure that the feeds are on, and not just limited to a content summary (nor include any feed flair or extra stuff like Google Adsense for Feeds.) Blogger Backup can download comments, unfortunately, it cannot them. Nor can it download images, however these are features currently in development.

Just like with WordPress, you’ll have to backup your template separately. Blogger allows you to edit and save the html of your template directly. Make sure to include the widgets and just copy and paste the text into notepad.Unfortunately copying the template does not copy the widget content, which means you’ll have to open up each widget and copy the text into a separate document.

To be honest, you could probably backup your blogger blog using WordPress. They have an import function that allows you to get your posts from other blog platforms, including blogger. They also have an export function that allows you to “save” your blog. When we moved over our Gohanyo.ca recipe cookbook, WordPress accurately moved over our posts, comments, and categories. Truth be told, while we’re using Blogger Backup to backup our travel blog, it’s only a matter of time before we switch to WordPress entirely.

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