Easy Blogger blog Backup Tip

Lifehacker posted a wonderful tip on how to back up your (new) Blogger blog posts.

Normally, I fire up HTTrack Website Copier (freeware) and in a while, eventually have a copy of my blog tucked away on my hard-drive, ready for off-loading to a CD-R disk. Only thing is that if I forget to set the link depth correctly, I end up scraping a copy of each linked page along with it. While interesting to see which ones have gone MIA, it can take a bit of time.

The Lifehacker gang found the following tip over at Google Operating System blog's post: How to Backup a Blogger Blog

The Backup

So, if you have a (new) Blogger blog, or have converted your old Blogger blog over to the (new) Blogger blog, just use one of these, replacing the "blogname" with your blog's name:

To display in a single page view the last N posts from your blog, use the following URL:
http://blogname.blogspot.com/search?max-results=N

Example: If your blog has less than 1000 posts, you can save this page:
http://blogname.blogspot.com/search?max-results=1000

Once you have the page loaded up, just save it to your drive.

For Firefox, just select "File", "Save Page As...." and give it a name (I use a name-date combo) and a place to save. Done!

For IE7, same thing, "File", "Save Page As..." and give it a name.

Both Firefox and IE7 offer several formats to save it in. I just chose the "complete" format method.

Google Operating System suggests using the Firefox Add-on DownThemAll to grab photos uploaded to your blog as well.

Don't forget to back up your Template as well

Now would also probably be a good time to download a copy of your Blogger template file as well.

Go to the Template tab from your Google Dashboard. Then select the "Edit HTML" sub-tab link.

Then use the "Download Full Template" link under the Backup/Restore Template and save it locally as well.

The Restoration

Restoring a saved template file is easy. Just go to the same place in Blogger you saved your template from and use the upload file feature to put it back.

Unfortunately, there isn't any explanation given on how to restore your blog posts with your saved file.

Here are some suggestions:

Open the local file in Firefox, select the post you want and copy the source-code, then paste it in your post-editor (HTML-mode) and repost. The date would be off, however.

Open the local file in a brawny notepad-editor program--like NOTEPAD++ Dig into the code and find your post. Then, again, copy and paste the selected code into your post-editor (HTML-mode) and repost. Again the dates would be off.

Reality Check

This really isn't a great technique if you are really trying to capture a mirror image of your blog to then restore--with perfect date returns.

I would gather this would be more for someone who is afraid that a bored night-watchman at Google decides to press that small green button on his security desk that doesn't have a label. You know, the one that mysteriously deletes GMail archives?

This would allow you to quickly and easily save the "meat and potatoes" of your blog post content and formatting. In the event of data loss, you would still have something to work with in a relatively easy HTML code-preserving format.

Google also has their "Official" Blogger blog backup plan solution, although it doesn't seem quite as easy, nor does it provide "restoration" support either.

I like this single-page blog post generation trick. It is quick and easy enough to do with a minimum of fuss.

Bonus tip:

Once you've created your "custom" Blogger 1000 post page generator URL, save it as a bookmark!

Just one click on that bookmark to generate the page, and a few more to save it. Pretty Easy!

Happy Blogger Backups!

--Claus