Backing Up and Clearing Out

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!)