Quick and Dirty Blog Backup

I just read Sister Diane’s Archive-Along posting about blog backup. And, yes, I don’t do it as often as I should, so I exported my blog, saved it to my hard drive and mailed it to a couple email accounts as well.

I have another method for backing up individual postings. I don’t recommend this as your only backup method because it has major limitations:

• It can’t be used for actually reconstructing your whole blog unless you are prepared to do a lot of cutting and pasting. However, it will save your text and photos. (Don’t forget to back up your Flickr account if you’re linking to photos there.)
• It saves your posts when they are published, not when they are updated.

It’s major advantage is that it is pretty brainless and, once in place, requires zero effort. The instructions that follow are for WordPress users.

1. Go to My Dashboard.
2. Click the Widgets link on the Appearance menu.



3. Drag the “Blog Subscriptions: Email Subscriptions” widget to the sidebar of your layout.



4. Go to your site and click “Sign me up!”



5. Set up a filter in your email account to save these postings automatically to their own folder (or, for Gmail users, to label and archive them).

One word of warning: this works even for postings that you delete. So if you use your blog to rant about your boss or your spouse and then delete the posting in the morning, your email subscribers will have already received it.