Friday, December 16, 2011

Backing Up

I don't have any news on either of my sisters yet this morning.  When I know about Missy's results I will post over on her blog and will update this post to let you know it is posted.   I will also update this post to include any new news with Baby Girl, short of a birth.  A birth will of course receive it's very own blog post.

I was reading Melissa over at Stirrup Queen's blog last night and she had a post about backing up your blog.  Reading it gave me a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach.  Oh lord, I have really been MEANING to back up this blog.  I have been MEANING to do it for the last...Five years.

The truth of the matter is that this blog is not saved anywhere but right here.  I have no copies of posts.  No saved template.  No back up of comments.  No nothing.  NOTHING. If there was a glitch in the Matrix and I logged in to Blogger tomorrow and found a notice that my blog was gone, corrupted or accidentally deleted, there would be nothing I could do.  It would just be lost.

Do you know how devastating that would be for me?  DO YOU??    So after being freaked out by Melissa I decided that I was going to back up RIGHT THEN.  Of course I did.  Because what if my blog is GONE in the morning?  What if it is GONE in ten minutes?? DO I HAVE TIME TO BACK IT UP BEFORE IT GETS DELETED?  I decided the quickest easiest way to do a basic back up was to first just copy and past all my posts into a word document. This was suggested by Melissa, so I didn't come up with the plan on my own.  I know there are ways to back it up online, and I want to do that TOO, but I thought for now a Word document of all my posts would allow me to sleep at night.

So I started cutting and pasting.  The most recent posts first, then just clicking "Older Posts" to get to the next page.  I was doing about 20 posts at a time, and I thought it would be a quick process.

You guys.  How do you even read this blog?  It is a NOVEL of epic proportions.  Do you want to know how far I made it with my copy and paste method?  I made it to May.  Of THIS YEAR.  Do you know how long that took me?  OVER AN HOUR.

And here's the kicker.  Do you want to know how long my Word document was for the last eight months?

253 pages.

And I know what you are thinking. I do.  I have a lot of pictures posted.  Surely most of that 253 pages are picture, right?  Well Word also gave me a word count on my document.  Are you ready?

53,000.

FIFTY THREE THOUSAND WORDS IN EIGHT MONTHS.

Now I just need to copy and past the other FOUR YEARS AND THREE MONTHS into the document.

Good lord.

Do you all back up your blog?  Do you make a copy as you go?  Does anybody have a good blog back up method they would like to share with me?  Clearly I need one.

6 comments:

  1. Oh this is too funny!

    I never back up my blogs but I probably should do. I just let my old blogger ones gather dust when I moved to Typepad, but after the events of the past year or two I realise that maybe I don't want to risk losing those memories. I dread to think how long it will take though...

    Maybe it would be easier to publish a book than save all your work? hehe

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  2. Aarghh! I've never backed up my blog and I would be devastated too when it would be gone. However the copying it to a Word doc seems too time consuming.
    I just did a quick google search on backing up a blog and found this link:
    http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2005/11/back-up-your-blogger-blog/

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  3. What if you turned your blog into a book? I think blurb.com (my favorite book making site) has a turn-your-blog-into-a-book thingie. Maybe shutterfly or picaboo does too?

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  4. Dude, you were supposed to do it based on months :-) It really is faster to do it that way rather than clicking older posts.

    Next thing to do -- you know how there is a space to "export blog" in your settings? It will create a file that you can save to your computer? Do that next. Just save a copy of the file to your hard drive. And do that once a week or so.

    Do you self host? I can walk you through the backend of that because most hosts give you an easy way to create a blog backup.

    Also, another poor man's backup which has saved people a shitload of times -- go subscribe to your feed in Google Reader. When people have deleted their blogs by mistake, I've been able to go into my Reader and cut-and-paste all the old posts for them if they have a full feed. Doesn't work if you have a partial feed, but it's still better than nothing.

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  5. You are going to love me :)

    Go to http://blog2print.sharedbook.com/blogworld/printmyblog/index.html

    And either do the whole thing or just do year by year.

    It's on my master to do list too but I'm not paying all that money - I just want the PDF versions :)

    My word count is even worse than yours........................... :)

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  6. Whatever you do, do it NOW. I lost every single post I wrote for almost two years for the Travel Authority when they deleted the blog in January last year. I had a very few posts I had written in Word for some reason and some we quickly saved in Adobe, but that's it. ALL GONE. All of our trip to Ireland. All of our trip to Hawaii. GONE. Do it NOW.

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