I logged on this morning to find that both of my blogs had been down all night, and on contacting my hosting provider, discovered that their server had physically broken and they were having to install a new machine, and restore peoples sites from backup. As it is a simple shared hosting package, these backups could have been several days old. Fortunately, the last thing I did before switching off last night was back up both my blogs, so I wasn’t too worried. Thankfully, everything was restored OK, and is now working fine.

But it got me thinking: Would you want to re-enter a whole day’s posts? What about a weeks worth? Comments as well? If you’ve never backed up your blog, you could lose several years worth of posts & blogs - a disaster? You shouldn’t rely on your host either: Mine proved themselves to be good, but even on a platform like Blogger, it may be powered by Google, but do you think a free service has that many copies of all the Blogger blogs, that it couldn’t possibly lose part, or all of your blog? I doubt it.

Fortunately, the solution is simple:

WordPress Users: Install the WP-backup plugin.  In site admin, go to ‘Manage’, then click on ‘Backup’, and let the magic take place. I recommend emailing/downloading the backup to your PC & then uploading a copy to some other webspace, or put it on a CD etc. Restoring your SQL database, whilst initially scary, is actually very easy and I will write this up at a later date. If you need any help, email me & I’ll talk you through it.
Blogger: Nothing as simple and easy as WordPress I’m afraid, but there are ways:

• Bloggers Instructions for backing up a copy of your blog. Bit techy, if you haven’t changed/edited your template, you will not want to do this.
• Email each post to your self after writing it. Blogger How-To. A little cumbersome, and you may find it easier to write up your posts first in WordPad, save them & then copy them to Blogger for posting.
• Use a free 3rdparty tool such as Website Copier. This will make a copy of your blog on your hard drive, which you can then upload in times of trouble. Once your blog reaches a certain size, this may become very unwieldy.

More proof, if it were needed, that although Blogger may be easier to start blogging with, you can do so much more, quicker & easier with WordPress. If you know how to backup up other blog formats such as Typepad, why not contribute an article & I’ll post it for you.