How can I back up my Blogs...and do I really need to ?

 We’re all guilty of it…and most of the time we get away with it…but sooner or later disaster strikes…..

I’m of course referring to our forgetfulness about taking regular backups of our data...and how we assume they’re either not necessary at all, or that someone else is doing them for us.

Nowadays, admittedly most things are stored in ‘the cloud’, and we assume that anything that lives there is properly protected.  But is this really a sensible assumption, given the prevalence of ransomware attacks and hacking generally ?

While our data is safe and well-cared for most of the time, things can, and do, go wrong. 

Blogs and websites that we’ve taken a lot of  time and trouble over creating are no exception – they’re all stored on Google’s servers, but they can get accidentally deleted, (sometimes even unwittingly by ourselves!). 

I’ve dealt with the process of backing up a Google Sites website separately in my User Setup Guide, which you can download here. Now for some info on how to do the same for a Blogspot blog…..and more to the point what we can do with the backup copy if things go wrong.

Backing Up Your Blog

Backing up from Blogspot is relatively simple. First, log in as you usually would to compile and edit a new blog.  Make sure you have the correct blog selected – if you have more than one blog, you’ll see a dropdown menu  at the top left of the screen – select the correct blog using this if it’s not already loaded.

Move down the main menu until you find the ‘Settings’ Option and scroll down to the ‘Manage Blog’ heading. You’ll see an ‘Backup  Content’ option – click it. This will invoke an app called ‘Google Takeout’ which is used to export any content from your account’s workspace.

Google will now display the Google Takeout app’s main screen, and show a record of what you’ve exported recently. It will also show you the product it thinks you’re most likely to want to export (in this case Blogger). Click the Next to proceed to the next screen where you’ll be asked how you want to receive the data. You do have the option of storing the backup on your GDrive, but this would defeat the object of taking it out of the cloud and storing it elsewhere. You would also be unable to view the content offline. Instead, select the default option i.e. ‘Send Download Link via eMail’. Select the options ‘Export Once’, Filetype as ‘.zip’ and the file size limit as ‘2GB’ – unless you have a huge blog, you’re unlikely to exceed this. Finally click the ‘Create Export’ button to start the process.

Google is normally quite quick at compiling the export file, but it may take a few minutes for the email containing the link to come through (make sure you check your Spam folder if it doesn’t appear within about 5 mins).

The final part of the jigsaw is to retrieve the link and use it to download the file – you’ll be asked for your Google login credentials and where you want the file to go to.

The output you actually get from Takeout is quite complex (a typical example with the export stored in a Backup directory on a pc HDD is shown in the figure). As we’ll see shortly, you only need one of the files to re-create your blog.

How Do I use the Backup Output Created ?

Reasonable questions at this stage would be “…what on earth can do I do with all these files ?..” and “..how do I do it..”.

The answers depend on your situation.

If you just want to have a backup copy, which you update periodically and don’t need to view, you just need to store the export content safely for now. If you lose your blog content from the cloud, you can then re-import it into Blogger.  The easiest and quickest way to do this is to use the .atom file from the original export. This contains most of the information you need.

Re-Creating a Lost Blog

To re-create your original blog, log into Blogger for editing as usual, then click the inverted triangle at the top left of your display to see the list of blogs you have available. You’ll see a ‘New Blog’ option at the end of the list – click this. You’ll then be asked for a name for your blog – call it something different from your original blog in case the old one reappears.

Blogger will now create a blank blog for you. Make sure this is the one currently selected.

To import the content of your .atom backup file, select the ‘Settings’ option and move down to the ‘Manage Blog’ option. This will offer you an ‘Import  Content’ option. Click it and browse for the .atom file generated by the backup process (make sure you select the one for the original blog – if you have more than one blog there will be an .atom file for each in the Takeout output).

Blogger should now load your content into the new blog  - follow the options to publish it. Remember to check the new blog’s settings to ensure you allow indexing, etc. as for the old version.

Viewing a backup blog file offline

If you want look at the content of a backed up blog, you could use a specialised viewer or browser extension capable of viewing .atom files. However, I spent a lot of time trying to find something that would render the .atom files in the form they were shown in Blogger, but couldn’t find anything that would do this as well as the parent program. The problem is that blogger generates the blog content in .atom format, which is effectively .xml i.e. the same content as for RSS Feeds. Although you can see the text content via offline/online XML readers, the layout can be confusing. Unfortunately you cannot use Blogger itself offline, since the software is designed for online use only and requires access to Google’s servers to function.

The best solution I’ve found to date for displaying your blog’s contents offline in an intelligible format is to use a tool to convert an image of it to HTML to PDF. If you do this at the same time as you create a backup, you’ll have a viewable record of what’s in your backup file, and will be able to access each blog individually.

There are a number of online packages which will perform the conversion. An easy to use option is ‘I Love PDF’. This online tool has a series of conversion options – look for the ‘HTML to PDF’ icon several rows down the main page. Click this and you’ll be asked for the URL of your blog (use the URL shown when you VIEW the blog, not the one that appears when you EDIT it). The software will then display a preview of your blog – click ‘Download’ and the software will render the blog content to .pdf and download it to your pc. You can then interrogate the individual posts within the .pdf version as you would normally when using Blogger.

If you decide to back up your blog regularly (say monthly), remember to create a parallel .pdf copy each time.

First published 9.6.26

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