Back it up! Let's talk strategy.

During the 6 weeks I've been blogging, one great blog was accidentally deleted and another wonderful blogger lost a lot of information on her computer hard drive.  We all know we're supposed to back up, but so often we don't know HOW.  I did some research this week and decided on a backup strategy for my blog.

I wanted to share 4 ways to back up your blog here at Blogger, the plan for my blog and a couple extra tips.

# 1 - Have Blogger email you every time you post or receive a comment. You can set this up in the Settings tab on your Dashboard.   This is the easiest way to have all your content (posts, pictures and comments) without having to remember to do anything. Restoring from these emails is NOT easy and will be very time consuming.  However, it can be done.

Auto Email Posts:

 Auto Email comments:

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#2 - Subscribe to your blog in your reader. Then you'll have the text portions of your blog (no comments or pictures) should something happen. (although you could subscribe to your blog posts comments too)

#3 -  Export your blog. From your Blogger Dashboard, you can export your blog to a file on your harddrive. Should you need to restore it you can import it right back into Blogger.  This is done from the Settings Tab.  (blog tools, Export Blog).  This does not save your template or customizations, so make sure you copy that HTML in a separate file and save to your harddrive - every time you make changes to the layout.   You'll want to read up about exporting here and here

#4 - Use a 3rd party backup tool. I came across this back up tool for Blogger blogs. I like this one because it's FREE and not Google affiliated. With my blog, my reader and my email being with Google, that's a lot of eggs in one basket.  I tried the backup and restore functions with my test blog and am happy to report, it restored all the posts I deleted!!  It was fairly simple too. 

The software is open source located at CodePlex.com  Go to http://bloggerbackup.codeplex.com/

 MY PLAN:
I have Blogger Email my posts and I subscribe in Google reader. Those are two automatic ways I have a back up if I need it.  I don't have to remember to do anything!  This is great because I will only do the other back up tools - once a month.  I plan to do both a export from Blogger and the BloggerBackup Program. They offer different features and are both easy to use. I can spent two minutes a month backing up my blogs - that's all it will take.

I will also back up my Layout every time I make a significant change.  Do this by copying the HTML code into a text document on my harddrive. 

TIPS:
* Create a test blog! These are useful for so many things - from testing format changes to testing your backup and recovery.
* After you back up for the first time, practice a restore on a test blog!  You want to ensure you know the steps to restore and it will work properly.
* Pick a date to backup every month. Mine will be the 1st since there's other monthly triggers for that date, it will be easier for me to remember.

I'd love to hear what you're doing to back up your blog!  Got questions? Ask away!