Backing up your blog

Early on in blogging you quickly realise that losing your blog posts/entries would be incredibly annoying and hence should be subject to the same backup procedures you might employ for other irreplaceable data.

Of course, you could rely upon services like Blogger, to never lose your data but that seems a tad risky - for instance, they may decide to disable your account or data cente problems means it is accidentally lost. Such things are not unheard of amongst online services. Moreover, if you ever decided to migrate your blog to a different service provider or host, you would probably want to copy your posts across as well.

I've been using BlogBackupOnline since it came out in beta, which was incredibly easy to set up and feature rich, with no ongoing maintenance required. It enables you to take a full backup of your blog at a point in time and then will incrementally add to that backup thereafter.

The service allows you to restore your blog to one of four services [Blogger, Live Journal, Windows Live Spaces and Wordpress] although you should be aware that Blogger only allows 50 entries per day to be restored and so you would manually have to perform the restore function each day per 50 entries. You can also export/download your blog and the export file created will include all blog entries and comments output in the RSS 2.0 format. To date, I confess I've no experience of using the restore or export features and so can't personally verify their success, albeit writing this is prompting me to try it using an alternate service such as Wordpress.

The service is now coming out of beta with several sevices levels, one of which is a free service offering 5mb of storage. To give that context, my blog is using 3.2mb for the current 885 entries.

So, if you blog, you should obviously backup and you may as well do it for free with this incredibly easy to use service.

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posted by John Wilson @ 10:38 AM Permanent Link ,

newsvine reddit



Microsoft FolderShare ate my homework

According to BetaNews

Microsoft's FolderShare application which is intended to allow customers to synchronize files across multiple machines, has a bug which has ended up deleting them.

According to a statement from Microsoft sent to users of the service, an issue with FolderShare deleted files that contained special characters, such as trademark signs, accents and tildas, and the like.

Great - my second Microsoft grrrrrr of the day. I've used FolderShare as part of a backup strategy for my Laptop and enabling me to ensure I am always carrying current files. Now I have to worry about my files being deleted!


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posted by John Wilson @ 8:20 PM Permanent Link newsvine reddit