YOU HAVE spent hours, and written volumes on your blog.
Then, one day the worst thing imaginable happens - your online diary crashes.
The good news is, that does not need to happen.
Just as you take care to back up your photos, work and other important documents, you can and should do the same with blogs.
Like other electronic information, you cannot assume that your journal is completely safe and will remain intact indefinitely.
Blogs or web-hosting providers may come and go. Hard disks on servers may fail. Malicious hackers might delete all your words and photos at will.
On a more practical level, you might decide to migrate to another provider or blogging platform. Having a backup can make the transition smoother.
Ultimately, having a backup simply means your journal has a higher chance at posterity.
Here are some tips to help you accomplish this.
Read the documentation
There is no one single method to back up a blog, since there are literally hundreds of blogging platforms and providers out there.
Read the documentation of your blogging software or the help section of your blog provider.
If they already provide the instructions to backup your blog, it is fairly safe to follow them.
DIY
If you are hosting your own server and blog, check with your service providers to see if they generate automatic backups.
Even if they do, it would be prudent to generate your own backups and download them to your computer.
For instance, if your server has a Cpanel control panel, you might be able to select 'Backup' then 'Full Backups'.
Your hosting provider should be able to regenerate your site and blog from these backups.
Do not panic if you cannot find any documentation or backup features.
You can still get around such obstacles - just roll up your sleeves and do the backup manually.
Just as you can save a web page for future offline browsing, you can save your blog pages too.
But do not do it the slow way, opening each blog page and then saving them.
Get a tool such as HTTrack, which allows you to save whole websites for offline browsing. These tools can automatically 'crawl' your blog, saving and preserving the pages and link structure.
Two birds with one stone
Tired of service and site interruptions on your free blog provider?
Get an offline blogging tool instead. These will allow you to compose your journals on the computer without the need to log into your blog.
The good thing is that you can easily save a copy of your completed entry to your computer, then upload the entry to your blog.
Certain tools such as w.bloggar also allow you to post to multiple blogs simultaneously, which in its way is a form of backing up as well.
Help! I seem to have lost everything!
If you don't already have a backup, and neither does your service providers, your last hope would lie in the caches on the web.
How this works is that Google takes a snapshot of webpages as it crawls the web.
If your blog has been cached into Google's servers, you could then retrieve the snapshot by following the link labelled 'Cached' that appears beside the search result for your blog.
Try googling for your own blog, and then follow Google's cached pages.
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