First, a brief tutorial. Just a few days ago, we had an incident in Blogland where Google deleted someone's account for a terms-of-service violation. This eliminated their entire blog, which they'd been keeping for close to 20 years. I can't imagine how heartbreaking it would be to lose all that work.
Every six months or so I make a blog backup. You can download the entire contents of your blog into an XML file that you could then re-import into Blogger to re-create a lost blog. This works; I did it in 2008 when I quit blogging for a while and deleted my blog. I then restored it the following year when I started again. I don't quite understand how it works, because when you look at the backup it's just a lot of text gobbledygook and there are no visible pictures or anything, but somehow it all comes back. The only problem I experienced when I re-imported the blog was that my earlier comments all went to "anonymous" -- somehow it broke the link with the commenters' identities. Now, when you look back at my posts from 2008 and earlier, all the comments show as anonymous. Which is a shame.
Anyway, here's how to make a blog backup. Go to "settings" on the left-hand side of your Blogger dashboard. Scroll down to the "manage blog" section. Click "back up content." A pop-up window appears; click "download." Your blog content will be downloaded in a single file -- in my case, it's a 158 MB file, which isn't much considering how big my blog is.
Then, if (God forbid) you lose your blog, you can create a new one, go to the same "manage content" section and hit "import content," and restore it by uploading that XML file.
I have no idea whether this works for other platforms. In other words, I'm not sure you could download a Blogger backup and then upload it to Wordpress or Typepad. So, needless to say, if your blog has been deleted because of something you did on Blogger that offended Google, you'd have the same problem if you restored the blog. (Unless they tell you what you've done wrong and you're then able to correct it.)
Anyway, I thought this advice might be helpful to those readers who also keep their own blogs. Everyone else, sorry for the boring diversion!
You're getting a mishmash of pictures today. The top photo I took in our garden yesterday. Dave said it got down to 40º F (or 4.4º C) while I was in Florida, which is perhaps why the leaves of our geranium are getting those colorful edges. The picture above I snapped quickly out the car window in Jacksonville. Is it the "We're for Jesus" Love Center, or the "We're for Jesus' Love" Center? Some punctuation would be helpful here.
Surprisingly, work yesterday wasn't too difficult. I felt pretty awake. It was only when we sat down to watch "The Great British Bake Off" last night that I struggled, through no fault of the program. I had to get up and do laundry and dishes and some other stuff just to keep my eyes open until bedtime, and then I slept like the dead. It was fantastic and this morning I feel pretty much normal.
While I was at my brother's I spent some time going through old photos. My brother has boxes of stuff from my mom's house, and he's trying to organize and clear some of it out. I brought home a handful of pictures including the one above, which was probably taken in 1973 or so, and shows me swimming in the lake behind my childhood home near Tampa. I'll probably be slipping more old photos into my posts here and there -- it's a good way to store them. (As long as I back them up!)
What have you got on your head?
ReplyDeleteA swimming mask. The old fashioned Jacques Cousteau type. :)
ReplyDeleteUseful information.
ReplyDeleteCould I use the file to print a hard copy of my blog?
Good to see old photos.
We must go through ours and annotate them.
I don't think so. The file won't look like your blog at all. Like I said, it's just gobbledygook -- basically the words you've written plus a whole lot of html coding.
ReplyDeleteThe guy’s name is Jesus Love Center. He’s running for office.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the reminder. I had been downloading my blogs every day. Got out of the habit and am now too far behind to want to try and catch up. I should see how WordPress enables me to save everything.
Another way to save your blog us to import it to wordpress. You need to create a free account there, start a "new" blog and import your blogger contents. You can set this version in wordpress to "private" which means it is not shared online and just available for yourself. Then you just need to import new posts regularly like every couple of months.
ReplyDeleteAt that age I would not have wanted my kids swimming in a lake in Florida. Had your parents never heard of alligators? Thanks for bothering to explain how to back up a blog. I feel so sorry for Andrew. His blog has never seemed offensive. I think its deletion was probably a bot error and not something Andrew did to merit such terrible punishment. He didn't even have an opportunity to defend himself. Awful.
ReplyDeleteI have to say that I was shocked when Andrew's blog just disappeared. I don't understand why, but it seems as if he should have been forewarned so that he could take some action to save the content.
ReplyDeleteHow lucky you are to have those photos, Steve. I hadn't realized how many people are denied that simple happiness, to have pictures of themselves growing up.
Thanks for the tutorial. I've now backed mine up though the title is the date of my last entry. I'll take your word for it that the entire 14 years is in that file.
ReplyDeleteAll righty. I've backed up too! Thank you! I like Sabine's idea. I might try that as well.
ReplyDeleteSo glad you weren't a zombie at work.
Look at that darling little boy in the lake!
Thanks for sharing the block back up info. And I agree with Yorkshire Pudding...alligators?
ReplyDeleteThanks for the tutorial. I don't know if my blog will ever get deleted, but it's nice to have a way to save it.
ReplyDeleteThank you for the reminder to backup the blog. I did that a few years ago, and now I can't even remember where that file ended up. I will do a backup today.
ReplyDeleteLove seeing that little you in the lake.
I've often wondered about what would happen if I somehow lost my blog. Thanks for the tip to back things up.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the tutorial. I printed off the poetry parts of my first blog (started in 2008 and deleted in about 2011). I only wanted to keep the poetry so printed off everything labelled "poem". That worked ok. The next blog I accidentally deleted the whole thing permanently, but didn't really worry about it. The current blog I might delete and I am not that bothered if I lose it all. It is not of any interest to anyone and the only bits I would like to keep are the photographs and I have them on my photo file. I still write poetry but I don't publish it on the blog. I like your US photos, old and new.
ReplyDeleteI always worried about the format being dependent on Blogger, now Google, and what my ability would be to restore them to a usable formate so went a different route. At the end of the month, I select the entire month in the archives widget and then copy and paste them into a Word document and save that by the month and year into a folder on my computer that gets backed up to the cloud. This preserves the pictures and the word text so that I can repopulate posts on a different platform if needed though all comments are lost. I could copy the comments if I did each post individually but have chosen not to do so. My plan it to just eventually print them out and have them bound into a book for a descendant to find someday.
ReplyDeleteThanks for this advice. I can't imagine losing my whole blog. That would be devastating. And, with all the strange things happening with blogger these days, it's a smart idea to take a backup. A year or so ago, I got up early one morning and checked my blog only to find that blogger had sent me an email telling me I had violated some rule and my post was not published. If I disagreed I should contact them. It was just an ordinary post, no swear words, no threats, nothing questionable. I sent a comment back and they immediately released the post. I can't imagine what they thought was objectionable about my post.
ReplyDeleteAnd, just a few days ago, I checked my spam folder and found a comment in there that had been made over a month ago and had been posted. I check the spam folder almost every day and it wasn't there before. The whole Spam issue is a complete shambles.
I just checked the spam folder again and found a comment you made to my September 24th post sitting there. I know for a fact that it had been posted back in September. Blogger is getting a little crazy these days.
ReplyDeletebacking up my blog as I type. Will look into other ways as well. Would hate to lose it because it is a journal of my life. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteI am looking to more of your old photos.
Thank you for the tutorial. I was thinking I should do this the other day. I used to make photo albums, but finding anything is such a pain. Losing this blog would be like losing a body part.
ReplyDeleteIt's not easy for me to do things like you suggested since my internet is so slow and limited data-wise. (people really don't comprehend this problem exists in rural America!) When I transferred my Blogger content to Wordpress, I had to visit one of my kids who actually had "real" high speed internet I could borrow. When I wanted to move my first blog (at Yahoo360), I didn't have any options like that (that I knew of), so I just printed out 2.5 years worth of text and photos! I guess at this point if it all went away, well.... I'd just sigh and move on to something else.
ReplyDeleteI didn't know geranium leaves would do that! It's lovely.
I always write first in Word first and then post to blogger, and save the Word docs in a folder, which acts as a backup. It can however cause tricky difficulties with formatting if you are not used to that system.
ReplyDeleteOne reason I never backed mine up was I thought it would be a monster file, but it clearly isn't. Very good advice to anyone using Blogger.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if typepad has such a back up. I can't believe that it would be so small a file. Of course, the photos are probably compressed somehow, right? I know nothing.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the tip on backing up Blogger.
ReplyDeleteI never thought I could lose it all, yikes! 10 Years of travelling memories gone! I too backed everything up, thanks!
ReplyDeleteI usually back up everything onto an external hard drive, including my blog, but I'll follow your tutorial as well.
ReplyDeleteI think it's wrong of Google to not tell what he did wrong.
Mitchell: Ha! A name like that could definitely get the guy elected in some communities!
ReplyDeleteSabine: OK, so it's good to know that Blogger content will import into Wordpress. I wasn't sure if that would work.
YP: I find it very troubling that Google hasn't explained why they took that action. On the help forums they say you'll be warned or receive an explanation if they find you've violated TOS -- but apparently not in this case. As for alligators, we had several of them in our lake over the years, but our belief was they'd stay away from people and they always did. We never saw them close up.
Debby: I agree. They should have warned him. As for pictures, I had a photo of me and some other kids in my first-grade class, and I sent it via Facebook to one of the girls in the photo. She was so appreciative because she said she didn't have many pictures of her childhood.
Ellen: Hmmmm. My backup is titled "blog-10-11-2022.xml" so I imagine yours should be something similar.
Ms Moon: I like Sabine's idea too. I may not create a Wordpress blog right away but it's nice to know that's an option.
Colette: You know, when I was a kid, we just didn't worry about alligators. Like sharks, they were out there in nature but we believed if we didn't bother them, they wouldn't bother us. And in our case that was always true. We used to see them floating in the distance on the lake but they never came close to us.
Bob: It's good to know it's an option, anyway.
Robin: Well, that's the other thing. Once you have a backup, you need to keep track of it! :)
Red: It's scary to be at the mercy of these big companies and their arbitrary decisions!
Rachel: It's probably healthy to not be too attached to your blog. I think I'd be pretty devastated if I lost mine. I've put a lot of effort into it.
Ed: That's a good system too, and it has the advantage of being readable in its backup form (whereas the XML file is not).
Sharon: How weird about your post. At least they gave you a warning. I've never had that happen but it's probably only a matter of time. As for the comments, yes, I've had the same thing happen -- old comments on old posts that were previously published somehow turn up in spam. I have no idea what's going on.
Wilma: That's how I feel, too! This is my journal and I'd hate to lose all the memories.
Allison: Exactly! I love having all these memories in a searchable online platform. (I also put the photos on Flickr, so they're searchable there too.)
Kelly: Well, that IS a problem, although the backup file is smaller (at least on Blogger) than you might think.
Tasker: That's a good way to do it, too.
Andrew: Yeah, I'm surprised it's not a larger file. It's bewildering but it works!
Margaret: Honestly, I'm not sure what happens with the photos. I don't think they're really included in the backup -- instead, I think there are links showing where they're located on the Google servers. That's just a hunch.
Catalyst: Hope it's useful!
James and Brigitta: Good! I'm glad I could help! I'd also be horrified to lose it all.
River: I agree. He deserves an explanation. I hope he follows whatever grievance process exists to have a human review the decision.
First of all, I love seeing the old photos, so keep it up! Those are treasures, at least in my world they are!
ReplyDeleteAnd thanks for the blog back-up info. I think I'll do that today. Does it come down as that xml file on your computer or where does it land (just so I know where to find it if need be.) Too bad about the anonymous comments. Like your blog, mine is almost a journal and I'd hate to lose it forever!
In response to your response to my comment, my blog is important to me but as far as its importance goes after I am no longer here it is of no importance to anyone or at least it shouldn't be.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the back up tips. I should do that but have never thought about it until now.
ReplyDeleteThat is a cute kid photo of you.
What a great photo of you in that lake. It's frame worthy I think. Could be a real conversation piece on your wall. It that a dive mask you're wearing?
ReplyDeleteThanks for the tip - I backed my blog up. I've been wondering if I should switch to a different platform because blogger has been so weird lately. But I'm too trifling to mess with it.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad work went well yesterday! And that photo of practically baby you swimming is adorable.
Does it automatically back up any new posts or do I have to go in there and do it manually?
ReplyDelete