Scraps Of Mind

Have you backed up your blog?

Welcome to Scraps of Mind. I'm delighted to see you. Why not check out the site, and if you like what you see, subscribe to my RSS feed and get daily updates delivered to you. If you're not sure what the RSS thing is, then check out this 'RSS made easy' post. Thanks for visiting and I look forward to seeing more of you.

It occurred to me that I have invested many many hours into this blog over the last fourteen months. And it contains a lot of material that I don’t hold anywhere else. I suspect many of you are in the same boat. I don’t have copies of the posts I’ve written and many of the photos, such as those for my collections, I haven’t kept anywhere else.

Now one of the reasons that I moved my blog to Wordpress is that it has a very reliable reputation. But what if the server did fry it’s brains? What if Wordpress couldn’t recover my precious words and pictures and links? They’d be able to recover my blog, but I don’t believe they back-up all the individual data. So how would I feel if I lost it all.

In a word: DEVASTATED!

How about you? Can you live with the possibility of losing all the history you have built into your blog?

Fortunately on Wordpress backing up your data is supremely simple and quick and I urge all you Wordpress bloggers to do it immediately you have finished reading this.

Just go into your Dashboard and select Manage from the menu bar across the top. Then click on Export in the sub-menu bar. You will get a screen containing a button labelled Download Export File. Click and it will create a XML file containing all your blog data which you save to your computer. In the event of technical disaster, just repeat the above steps, selecting Import instead of Export and your backed-up data will be restored to blogland. And this just takes 2 seconds. No hanging around whilst files transfer. Instant.

I don’t know how (or if) this works on other blog engines. I tried to find out how to do it on Blogger and I couldn’t find any directions for backing up. If any of you Blogger people know how they facilitate back-ups please leave a comment for other Blogger folk in case they don’t know.

But for all you Wordpress people…Do it!

Do it now!!!