Tuesday, April 17, 2012

How To Backup a Blogger.com Blog

For a long time I used a utility called Blogger Backup, which had been uploaded to CodePlex.  It never really got all the kinks worked out of it and had not been updated for a long time, but it was good enough.

I was feeling like posts were disappearing from my blog, but I couldn't put my finger on a specific event or post that was disappearing I started to suspect maybe a bug in Blogger Backup, but I had no proof and still have no proof to this day.  I started looking around for other options.  Every time I would search I just kept getting pointed back to Blogger Backup.

Finally I began to wonder if Google hadn't built in a backup utility into blogger or an export or something after all these years.  I did some searching and found that there was something in Basic Settings.  The post must have been old, because there was nothing there dealing with export.  I happened upon the Other category under Settings.  There was the option that they had described in the post which stated it should be under the Basic section of Settings.

Here's what you do.

  1. Log into blogger.
  2. Go to the listing of your blogs.
  3. Click on your blog.
  4. On the left click the Settings item.
  5. It will expand and in there click the Other item.
  6. You will be presented with several things in here.  The one at the top is Blog Tools.
  7. In there you will see Import Blog, Export Blog, and Delete Blog.
  8. Click Export Blog.
  9. You will be prompted to download an XML file.  Click download and then give it a location and a name.
I would like a way to download all of my blogs in one click, but for now you have to do one by one.  They could perhaps give us the option to download all and let us choose a naming pattern for the files it would generate.  The advantage of doing them one by one is that you can uniquely and specifically name each blog's file.

So if you need to backup your blog, which everyone really should be backing up, you can use the old Blogger Backup or you can use the Export Blog feature from with Blogger to export an XML file.