Blog Backup

— Coming Soon —

There are good reasons to do blog backups. One is just to have a local copy of your blog. Or, maybe you want to backup individual posts for printing off-line. Backing up can also be used to repair a post that is poorly formatted and causing blog display problems. There are tools like HTTrack that will backup a blog if you are willing to learn how to use it; Firefox has a Scrapbook extension that can serve as backup tool; but, I like it simple.

There's plenty of info available. Blog*Stars nitecruzr and panther both have information and it's easy to search for more. I use a variation of nitecruzr's Print Your Blog To Paper.

When I write a post, I do it off-line in a text editor. I also prepare images for posting, and rarely post large images; I find 800px to 1,000px good enough, since I use images to support the story, not the other way around. I also put my name on them, add copyright, etc. So, a post image has been cropped for content, scaled to size, had my name pasted on, had a copyright statement added to the EXIF data, and compressed to around 125K. I store all of those images locally, so I don't need to backup the uploaded copy, I just need text and layout, including the post-size images. That's my starting point for an archive backup.

Here's my full blog backup procedure. This is for a blog stated on June 15, 2006 and the first backup will be to yesterday, Sept. 13, 2008. 'blog_address' is whatever you use to access your blog, and you do not need to be logged in to do this.

– Plan where you are going to save the blog.

– Open a text editor and assemble the address; it looks like this:

http://yourblog.blogspot.com/search?​updated-min=2006-06-15T00:00:00Z​&updated-max=2008-09-13T23:59:59:00Z​&max-results=5000

I have included line wrapping code (​), so be very careful if you copy it.

– Unwrap the code so it's one continuous line.

– Fill in the blog address and the dates.

– Paste the assembled address into your favorite browser's address bar and Go or Enter.

– When the results appear, on the browser menu, File > Save As > give it a name > maks sure the location is selected > select Complete Web Page > click Save or OK.

– When the file is saved, on the browser's menu, click, View > Source or Page Source. When the page source appears, on the viewer menu, File > Save As and save it to the same location, but add "source" to the name.

A file with the name you entered plus a name_files folder will be created in the storage location. The file will be the source code, and the folder will contain the support files, like images, external css files, script files, etc.

You can open the blog file and you will be viewing a local copy. The post images, for example, will be the copy from the _files folder. If you click an image, the large copy will still come from Blogger.

If you need to restore a post, you need to edit the image addresses back to the Blogger address, rather than the _files folder. The original address can be found in the second 'source' file saved earlier.

Single Post Backup

Single post backups can be made when you just need one post.

– Click the permalink for the post you want, so you are just looking at one post.

– On the browser menu, File > Save As > give it a name > maks sure the location is selected > select Complete Web Page > click Save or OK.

– The blog page will be under the file name and there will be a _files folder containing supporting files, like images, external css files, script files, etc.

Save Source For Reair

Sometimes an in-post code error has a bad affect on the entire blog page. It may be earier to extract the post code, do the repair outside the Blogger editor, then r-insert the code.

As usual, working with Html code sounds harder than it really is. Following this will make it a -cool- breeze.

– Open a text editor (not Word.).

– Click the bad posts permalink so you are looking at one post.

– On the browser menu, File > Save As > give it a name > select Desktop as the location > select Complete Web Page > click Save or OK.

That was a backup, do not work on it.

– On the browser's menu, click, View > Source or Page Source.

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