If you have a blog, it's unlikely you back it up. But if the content of your blog, from body copy to images to comments, are of any value (and why are you writing it, if not?), then you should have some kind of system in place for backing it up.
I'm going to look only at personal blogs on three of the most popular hosting sites—Tumblr, Wordpress.com, and Blogger—although I'm sure you'll find that some of the ideas for how to back them up are applicable to other blogging services, too.
Option 1: Use a Third-Party Service
The simplest way to back up a blog is to use a third-party service. I've seen so few of them, though, that I wasn't exactly floored by the options. If you have a decent third-party backup blog service that you like, please mention it in the comments.
BackupBuddy is a plugin for WordPress that, for $80 a year for two licenses, creates a backup of your blog that's sent to Dropbox, Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud, an FTP server, or your email so you can keep the backup locally.
WordPress users might also investigate BlogVault. BlogVault backs up your blog to another location and keeps version histories, too. Restore service is included, too. BlogVault costs anywhere from $9 per month to $39 per month.
Tumblr users can try the tumble-log Backup Jammy, which spits out an HTML page containing whatever you select: text, links, quotes, photos, chats, videos, songs, or all content. It's up to you to decide what you'll do with the backup.
Option 2: Export
Another pretty simple solution for backing up your blog is to export it to your desktop, but that requires exporting it every time you update it or see new user comments added. Plus, you don't necessarily get everything, like your blog's theme settings, included.
Tumblr has its own backup app for Mac users. To use it, you download a piece of software, sign in with your Tumblr account credentials, and download what is essentially an export of your blog to your desktop. The custom theme code is included in this export as a separate file. This backup app at least does perform incremental media backups, meaning image and audio files are only downloaded if they don't already exist in the backup folder. Text content and post data are re-downloaded each time you run the app, though.
Blogger's export tool takes little effort to use, but it does not contain the theme file, which you have to export separately. And as I said before, you'll have to re-export your blog each time new content is added, whether that's a new post or new reader comment. Exporting from WordPress is equally simple but imperfect for creating backups.
But, depending on what you intend to do with the backup, or how much of the data is valuable to you, you might not feel at a loss to exclude the comments, in which case you could look into a DIY solution.
Option 3: DIY Solution
One idea for putting in place a DIY solution for backing up your blog is to automate the reposting of each of your blog entries to another blog service, but keep that blog marked private so that it does not compete with your existing blog.
If I were going this route, I'd use ifttt, which stands for "if this, then that," to automate the reposting. For example, if you have a Blogger blog, you could create a Tumblr blog, leave it private, and have all your posts automatically be "backed up" to Tumblr, or vice versa.
ifttt offers a number of automation options, which you can customize, too, to include or exclude certain aspects of your post, like the date it published. You won't get comments on the private backup blog, but at least you'll have everything else.
If this solution sounds like one you might use, you would probably want to start by exporting your entire blog, and then re-importing what you have existing already into the new service. Then you can turn on an ifttt recipe that will forever after put your new posts into the secondary backup blog.
For more about getting organized, check out the book, "Get Organized: How to Clean Up Your Messy Digital Life" by Jill Duffy on Ganxy .
Get Organized is a weekly series of articles on PCMag.com to help you keep your digital files and online life organized. Check back every Monday for new tips and tricks. For more from Jill Duffy, follow her on Twitter @jilleduffy.
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