Backup Your Blog

Hopefully Heather doesn't mind me hopping on here unsolicited... but given what we went through on our blog awhile back, I thought this could be good info for all of you regular bloggers, regardless of how boring it is!

She knows that I'm a nerd, and I'm obsessed with keeping all of our important stuff (photos, music, videos, etc) not only synced up between a few different computers so we can easily see them anywhere, with or without the internet, but also backed up to where we could get to it and restore it all with no problem, even if our house blew up. So I thought I'd share a service I found after the recent blog hiccup...

The service is called Backupify. It's a cool concept in that their goal isn't to backup your data on your computer, but rather your "online life"... Facebook, Twitter, Gmail/Hotmail, etc. They have free accounts for up to 2 gigabytes of space, and I think the 10 gb accounts might still be free as well, but probably not much longer. But 2gb will cover most blogs.

Backing up the blog itself is relatively easy - it's a single .xml file that you can download that keeps the formatting, links, text, etc, in tact. But the pictures are another story, as they're typically hosted elsewhere. Backupify automatically backs up the .xml file daily, so if something happens, all you have to do is download it and restore it to your blog. So now your blog is back in the right format, but there are no pictures. They also, as of recently, backup Picasa photos (which if you don't choose somewhere else, all of your blogger.com photos are stored in Picasa's web albums).

There is, as of now, no easy way to restore the pictures without just taking the time to do it - but at least they're all still there... especially the heading pictures that some of you work so hard to make! They're working on making it to where you can download a single .zip file with all of your pictures in it, instead of one by one. And they have a good relationship with Google, so it wouldn't surprise me to see them develop some seamless way to restore the entire blog in the future, but that's speculation. And if you host your photos on Photobucket or Flickr, they also backup there.

It's a "set it and forget it" type of service, and you can have them email you regularly with status updates if you don't want to completely forget it. And if you're concerned about privacy, well you probably shouldn't have a blog that's open for anybody to read... but they use Amazon S3 for storage, and their privacy policy is solid.

It's not a perfect solution, but it's a decent one, and I have yet to find a good foolproof way of backing up our blog... which, in our case anyway, has become a diary of our life to some extent. Backupify also does a lot of other cool stuff, but it's not related to blogging, so I'll stop the nerdiness now.