Image by Mr. T in DC

This post has been submitted by Sharon Hurley Hall from Get Paid To Write Online.com.

It only takes a second for your blog to disappear forever. Believe me, I know. A few months ago my web hosting reseller fell out with the hosting company, leaving my blog as the casualty. I didn’t even have a recent backup. I don’t plan to let that happen ever again so I’ve been investigating some easy ways of making sure I always have a backup of my blog posts.

Backing Up With Email

One method that someone suggested recently was to use Gmail to backup your blog. All you have to do is subscribe to your posts by email then you get a copy of every post that you publish. That won’t help you with old posts, but it’s probably still worth starting now. I did that on my most important blog as soon as I read the tip.

Save The Comments Too

If you’re worried about losing comments, all you have to do is enable comment moderation and you will get a copy of most of your comments. You won’t get those that are held in the spam queue, though, but it’s a good enough solution for most of them. I must admit that I usually delete these emails once I’ve dealt with them, but I do have a backup Gmail account where they will probably remain forever.

Offline Composition

Compose your posts offline using Windows Live Writer, Scribefire or other popular blog editors and you will have copies of your posts in the program folder. It’s not always easy to recover them, but they are there, as I proved recently when I wiped my PC and had to recover my draft posts in WLW. All you have to do is work out where the files are stored and you can open them again.

External Storage

If your blog posts are stored offline, then you can back them up to another hard drive, portable storage or online storage, If you’re lookng for an online storage solution, my pick is Mozy which has a free edition, but look at BigBrightBulb’s post on online backups for more information. (The comments are worth reading too.)

Plugin Solution

Another solution for self hosted Wordpress bloggers is to use a backup plugin. There are a couple to choose from, including WP-DB-Backup, Backup Wordpress and WP-DB Manager. I’ve used WP-DB-Backup which allows you to download backups to your desktop, save them on your hosting account or email them to an address of your choice.

Using some or all of those solutions should ensure that you can rescue your blog if it disappears and begin the painstaking process of restoring it to its former glory. And if all else fails, you can use these suggestions from BigBrightBulb which saved my bacon when my blog was lost.

Sharon Hurley Hall
Get Paid To Write Online.com

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