Don’t be a Blog Orphan: How are you Backing Up

Think Like a Teacher blogger and I have been corresponding.

You see, I thought she was a new blogger and wanted to encourage her and help her write. However, I was wrong.

She is an orphaned blogger as she described in her post Orphans and Backups. She says:

“I moved my blog from such a place to this comfortable new home a couple of months ago. The symptoms that the parents were no longer there at my old “home”: no response at all to any “contact tech support” email (of course, this happens at very busy places, too), no recent press releases, and no updates to their Wordpress software. The result was that spammers took over. Without software updates to stay ahead of the latest spam tactics, my blog was overrun with Viagra and porn-filled “comments,” clogging the moderation queue to the point that I had to turn off comments on all but the most recent post. Without updated blogging software on my “family” servers, I was unable to add better spam tools or BACK UP my blog. The host site had locked access to do things myself. In the end, I had to walk out the door, leaving all my worldly possessions (posts and comments) behind in a sort of suspended animation (visions of Miss Havisham’s decayed room with cobwebs, lost in time?). My blog was an orphan.

I spent a long time trying to take everything with me, to no avail.”

So, I am grateful that her loss is not total in that she is SHARING THIS WITH US.

Bloggers, what are you doing to back up your blog? (or wiki or voicethread)

Spread this through the blogosphere.

On my blog I am e-mailing myself a copy of all blog posts (blogger does it automatically) and I was archiving all comments but stopped doing that. I'm going to start again.

Alas, I see no full backup — so I'm going to have to look into what to do.

What would happen if you were orphaned?

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Vicki Davis

Vicki Davis

Vicki Davis is a full-time classroom teacher and IT Director in Georgia, USA. She is Mom of three, wife of one, and loves talking about the wise, transformational use of technology for teaching and doing good in the world. She hosts the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast which interviews teachers around the world about remarkable classroom practices to inspire and help teachers. Vicki focuses on what unites us -- a quest for truly remarkable life-changing teaching and learning. The goal of her work is to provide actionable, encouraging, relevant ideas for teachers that are grounded in the truth and shared with love. Vicki has been teaching since 2002 and blogging since 2005. Vicki has spoken around the world to inspire and help teachers reach their students. She is passionate about helping every child find purpose, passion, and meaning in life with a lifelong commitment to the joy and responsibility of learning. If you talk to Vicki for very long, she will encourage you to "Relate to Educate" or "innovate like a turtle" or to be "a remarkable teacher." She loves to talk to teachers who love their students and are trying to do their best. Twitter is her favorite place to share and she loves to make homemade sourdough bread and cinnamon rolls and enjoys running half marathons with her sisters. You can usually find her laughing with her students or digging into a book.

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4 comments

Paul Hamilton January 23, 2008 - 4:19 am

I think this is something that every blogger needs to think about. Wiki servers generally make it quite convenient to back up content, but not blog hosts.

In August, 2006, I tested and blogged about a free program that will back up a website to a computer hard drive. After downloading, my blog functioned perfectly from my laptop when I was offline–all the pages, searches, etc. Of course, I haven’t been backing up regularly since then!

Here’s the URL for my post with details about HTTrack (for Windows and Linux). http://tinyurl.com/2sb2w8

I hope this still works. I plan to find out.

theother66 (formally MadMiller) January 23, 2008 - 11:59 am

Hi Vicki

I’m very new to blogging and I have had some ‘near misses’ trying to compose straight into the blog (ie lost work through not being able to connect to blogger whilst saving or my computer freezing) so I’ve taken to composing in Word – and then ‘cutting & pasting’.

I figure this way I’ll have copies for future reference/as back up too :).

Allison Miller
Adelaide, South Australia
http://twitter.com/theother66

Ross Isenegger January 23, 2008 - 12:30 pm

Thanks Vicki for the sober warning. My blog (http://mathfest.blogspot.com) is currently being cross-posted as http://www.commun-it.org/community/rossisen/weblog since I joined that community and it expected a blog to be housed there.

I thought it was a bit of pain, since comments from one site to do migrate to the other, however it is likely some kind of a backup strategy.

I think there are other ways to capture the RSS feed of your own blog as a backup – maybe furl?

loonyhiker January 23, 2008 - 3:58 pm

I write all my posts in Word first and save them so I will always have them. When blogger emails me comments, I save them in a folder for future reference. I never thought about backing up the website though. Thanks for this informaiton.

Comments are closed.

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