Disaster Planning: Backups for Bloggers

Updated March 18, 2010

There’s nothing more frustrating than discovering that all the time and energy you put into blogging a post or a page was for nothing. Suppose you clicked the “save” or “publish” button and the post went sailing into cyberspace but was not captured in the database. It’s forever gone and you must re-construct it. But  if  you do have a post or page that appears to have sailed off into cyberspace and you are a wordpress blogger you may get lucky.

What to do when you’ve lost a post or page?

Look in your Admin section to see if it was saved as a Draft or as a Private Post or Page (check both).

If you don’t find the post or page then it could be in your trash.  Provided you did not permanently delete it restoration is possible.

At WordPress.com there is an autosave feature that saves every 2 minutes.  Each time you click Save Draft or Update Post (or Page) a revision is saved. You can look the last autosave for Posts » Post Revisions or for Pages »Page Revisions

If the post or page has been published long enough for Google to index it you may be able to search and locate a cached version.

Backup Methods for Bloggers

1. The Safe Backup Bet – Use an Offline Blog Editor

The time to backup your posts is while you are writing them. The best method of doing so is to use an offline blog editor to compose your posts in and to publish the posts directly into your blog.

Using an off-line blog editor, rather than posting directly into the editor on any blogging platform provides many advantages. There are many free offline editors available and other that you must purchase and you will find the download links for them in Offline Blog Editors Review.

2. Raincoaster’s Copy/Paste Work Around

If you are not using an offline blog editor and instead you are composing your post on the wordpress editor (Tiny MCE) then you can take this precaution as you write.

• Highlight all of the post (Control A on windows) and copy it to the clipboard (Control C) and, while everything was still highlighted, click “Publish”.
• Even if you lose the post, you’ll still have it on the clipboard and it’s the work of a moment to do another.

3. Subscribe to Your Blog’s RSS Feeds

By subscribing to the rss feeds to your blog and setting them on “full” feed you will have a back-up of every post you publish and every comment posted. If you also wish to backup the images in posts there are different rss feed reader services to consider as only some include them.

4.  Jenny has supplied another online blog backup service as well called Back-upReview .

5. Periodically Export Backup Copies and Save them to Disc

You can export the posts, comments, categories and pages out of one wordpress.com blog and import them into another wordpress.com blog with ease. This does include any images or other uploads – you have to do that manually. And the links must be exported and imported separately.

There is an import and export function in your wordpress dashboard

-> Dashboard -> Tools -> Export

6. How to backup your blog using Feedburner and Gmail

“Subscribe to my Feedburner email subscription with a Gmail address that includes a label that will be automatically filtered to my archives when it comes in. Using your Feedburner email subscription, any new posts you publish will automatically be sent to your subscribers. Add yourself in with your normal Gmail address plus a label, i.e. Aseem1234+blogbackup@gmail.com and have it filtered to your archives! Viola! Now your entire posts will be emailed to you and saved in your Google account whenever you publish.” -> Read more here

7. Ignis backup tool for Linux

Ignis is a special backup program for the SOHO sector. It implements a full-backup strategy, a mix between the backup schemes of GFS and Tower of Hanoi. It is meant for backing up onto DVDs or simular media. Normally, it is called via cron to perform the backups and checks. Reports are sent via mail. The ignis project is licensed under the GPL (v2 or later).