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?
tag: blogging, education, blog, learning, security, backup
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4 comments
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.
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
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?
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.
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