Bloggers, don't forget to back up

Accidents or hackers can destroy hours of hard work, so learn to save your journal for posterity

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.

Google Expands Online News Index

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Google Inc. is expanding its online news index to include stories published years ago, continuing the Internet search leader's recent efforts to create new sales channels for long-established media while it strives to make its own Web site even more useful.

The news archive to be unveiled Wednesday includes old articles provided by a long list of media, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time magazine and The Washington Post.

Other leading information storehouses like LexisNexis, Factiva and HighBeam, also have opened up sections of their databases to Google's expanded index.

Until now, Google's 4-year-old news search service has focused primarily on stories posted on the Web during the past 30 days.



The new archives feature will only share excerpts from stories related to users' requests, which are expected to range from seminal moments in history to minutiae about sports and science.

To see the full stories, Google's visitors will be sent to the Web sites that own the content. Those referrals figure to provide media outlets with more opportunities to charge for access to the full stories - a common practice when people want to read historical information.

"This is going to be a very good thing for us," said Vivian Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of NYTimes.com. "There is a tremendous hunger out there for our archives."

Google won't collect any commissions for the sales referrals, hoping instead to make money indirectly from increased usage of its own site - the hub of a vast advertising network that accounted for most of the company's $1.3 billion profit during the first half of this year.



The arrangement marks Google's latest attempt to demonstrate the value of its search engine to the traditional media, a segment that has sometimes railed against the Mountain View-based company for profiting from the display of content owned by others.

The friction triggered a copyright infringement lawsuit by one major news organization, Agence France-Presse, which is seeking at least $17.5 million in damages. Google has denied the allegations.

Signs of a more cordial relationship with major media have emerged during the past month as Google announced separate business deals with The Associated Press and Viacom Inc.'s MTV Networks. The search engine also is aggressively promoting a video service that allows television networks and movie studios to sell content.

The news archive service represents "a perfect example of how we can work with content providers to realize their business goals," said Jim Gerber, Google's content partnerships director.

Patrick Spain, chief executive of HighBeam Research Inc., views Google's new service as a significant breakthrough for his Chicago-based service, which charges for access to most of the 40 million articles in its database.

"We would love to have people just come to HighBeam to do all their searches in the first place, but we are not naive enough to believe that is going to happen," he said.