As bloggers we spend a lot of time on getting our message out there. We’re always thinking about our story, what we’re sharing and how. Where we tend to get tripped up is the technical. Writing is delightfully non-technical (especially when you use as many commas as I do) but blogging? Blogging is a little technical at times.

Every now and then on twitter you see it happen, someone loses their content. All of it. Maybe they delete their files in their hosting by accident, maybe their hosting company’s servers are attacked by pterodactyls, but it happens and when it does it’s devastating. In the ‘early days’ before wordpress could automatically update its self, every few months I was met with the daunting task of updating my stupid wordpress installation. I know it’s not hard, but I didn’t have the experience I do now and I hated it. I was convinced that at some point for reasons beyond my control, it would blow up my blog and delete everything.

I know, I’m nothing if not delightfully quirky.

I became intent on being properly backed up, so that if something happened I had a current archive of my blog on hand. Backing up your blog is a safety net. If you get hacked, you still have everything right down to the comments. If you want to closed down your blog without losing everything you’ve written, you can. If you have an old blog that you want to merge with your new blog, you can back up your old blog and then import it to your new one in one move.

The best part is that it’s pretty much a one click process:

WordPress

On wordpress.com or wordpress.org, on any page when you’re logged in just click Tools, then Export:

There will be an option to “restrict author” which you can ignore. Just click the “Download” button and your backup file will start downloading automatically.

Blogger

With blogger, under your settings tab just click “Export Blog” and the giant “Download” button on the next screen:

and the backup file will start downloading right away.

Other Platforms

Are you on another platform? You can easily back up squarespace, typepad, and movable type too.

This is completely bare bones as far as the technical skills required, but I think it bears mentioning. It’s easy, fast, and can save you a world of pain if something happens. There’s nothing like knowing the little corner of the internet that you’ve been pouring your heart into is safe and sound.

Do you have any technical horror stories to share? When was the last time you backed up?