Have you ever thought about this – “What is the worst Nightmare for a Blogger?”. I think, the bloggers who use free blog service providers, like Blogger or Wordpress, the worst nightmare for them is the loss of the Blog. That is, one fine day you wake up and find the entire blog has gone down. The reasons can be many but the possibilities always exist.

The question is how do I prepare myself for this unwanted and unforeseen situation?

The answer is quite simple. Take a Backup of your blog on a regular basis.

How do I take this Backup?
There are different tools available for taking a copy or backup of your website and these tools often work fine with the free blog services also. But Blogger provides you a method of taking a backup of your blog and this is what makes it special (at least for me).

To take the backup of the blog at blogger, the first thing you have to do is to log-in to the control panel of the blogger. Once there, go to the settings tab and click the “Basic” Settings.

Here, search for Blog Tools (It is the first entry on the page). You wil find three links in this section –
a. Import Blog – The import Blog tool allows you to restore the blog that you had backed up earlier.
b. Export Blog – The export blog tool allows you to export the contents of the blog as an XML file that you can save onto your hard disk and use it later to re-create the blog.
c. Delete Blog – The delete blog tool allows you to delete a blog.

Now that we are going to take a Backup of the Blog, click on the Export Blog button. The next page that gets displayed is a message with another button. The message is self-explanatory – that you can export the blog as an atom format. Not getting into technicalities, this means a special format that blogger and other websites that understand XML and Atom Formats can decipher what is contained in the backup. Below this message you will find a button labeled “Download Blog”. Click this button to initiate the download process.

Once you click this button, it will prompt you to specify a location on your hard disk where you want to store the file. Note that only one XML file will get downloaded and this file will contain all that is needed. Give the appropriate paths and filenames. That’s all. You have a copy of your blog posts downloaded with you.

Backup the Template too!
The next thing that you might be interested in is taking a backup of your Theme especially if you have got the theme customized by someone or by yourself. This is essential just because it will save you the time re-creating the theme.

To take a backup of the theme, go to the layout tab in the control panel. From there, click the Edit HTML button. Here you will find the Download Template Button. Click it to initiate the download process. Specify the path where the file needs to be saved. You are done.

Hope you find the post interesting. Please feel free to comment or contact me.

Cheers.