TGBT: Backing Up Your Blog

If you tried to visit Ginger & Co. this weekend, you may have seen a very not so cool little page. 
One little button that I clicked too soon brought my whole entire website down, and some of the content may not ever come back, like last week’s “Blogging Tools Totally Worth Paying For” (I spent a lot of time on that post, too!).
My whole website accidentally was wiped out. Thankfully, I had a backup of the website earlier in the day. So, I reinstalled my backup, but I found out, that backup was only for the posts. Bummer, not even the photos came back. Thankfully, I keep all the photos.
[bctt tweet=”Backing up your blog may be the most important thing you do, read how to do it here >>”]
So, today, we’re going to talk about backing up your blog and why it’s absolutely necessary. We’ll take a quick look at how to back up in blogger and how to back up in wordpress, because it’s really important.

Blogger

When you login to your blogger dashboard, you’ll want to go to your blog’s settings. Once you’re in settings, click on the second subject “Other” and the top line will give you the option to import or export your blog settings and download it. It’ll download as an XML file, and ta-da, you’re good!

WordPress

WordPress, there’s actually two ways to back it up. You can use a plugin to backup your blog to either your email, or your dropbox account (I’m sure there’s other places you can back it up into, but these are the two I know about). I use “WPB2D,” which is WordPress Backup 2 Dropbox. Every week, on Friday afternoon, wordpress backs up my blog to dropbox, so I constantly have a new copy.
Sadly, when I uploaded this into my new database, it didn’t work, but that was because I had a whole entire new website, like I had deleted the original one. I’ve already set up this plugin to start backing this up again, every week.
Your other option is to manually download your blog. On your sidebar, there’s the “tools” menu option, and you have the options to import and export. Click export and you’ll get a screen that looks like this:

Obviously, you should do all your content. I think I’ll probably do this on top of my weekly back up, maybe once a month.

Why It’s Worth IT

After spending this weekend working on my website and nothing else I wish I had a good back up. It’s hard to see everything gone and to have to dig around to find it all. On top of that, I lost my other website, Ginger & Books, and I still have to rebuild that website too.
Sadly, I hadn’t done but one back up on there, so I have no idea how many posts I saved over there. It’s hard to see what happened. Like I said before, I cried Friday night. It seems so silly, but Ginger & Co, has been a big part of my life for a year and a half and it was all gone.
Save yourself the heartache and just back up your website! If you’re on blogger, set up a weekly task in your to-do list so you remember to back it up.