Are You Backing Up Your Blog Posts? - 19 Apr 2020

I was scrolling through blog posts yesterday and noticed that I had a dozen or more "corrupted" posts. Images that had been uploaded were now replaced with blank file icons. I'm not sure why this occurred, but the problem popped up in a number of blog posts going back to the end of February.

The last time I had backed up my blog posts was early march, so I had to spend several hours re-editing the posts and re-uploading the images. Had I backed up my posts when I created them I could just re-paste them back into Blogger. But, lesson learned. I'm backed up as of today, so hopefully this will prompt me to keep up data backup.

For those not currently backing up their blog posts this is my process:

I use FireFox as my browser for this since Safari does not appear to give me the option to save my web pages in a complete format.

Once a blog post is generated and Published it is a good idea to back up the entire html file.

First, click on the title of the post, and this will populate the address bar with the blog and link. It will also limit the page to a single blog post. Otherwise, if several blog posts are displayed on the page then all will be saved.

 

Then, click on \File\Save Page As "Web Page, complete". This will produce an HTML file and a folder with all of the necessary files for the post itself.

 

I will then put a date stamp "YYMMDD" in front of the filename so that I can later sort my blog posts by date published. Since I have 4 different blogs going, I have folders set up for each blog with subfolders for Year of that blog.

 

The file and folder will appear like this:

 

Even though Blogger is free, it has a limited file storage capacity per blog. Usually, but not always, when the file capacity is reached it will automatically delete oldest posts first (to free up space for the newest blog posts). I've run into instances where a particular blog post has been deleted even though older posts exist, and I have to go into my backup folders to re-access the deleted posts (which might be important for entering historic eBird records).

I keep several backups of my backups so I don't lose these HTML files. A few years ago I lost about 3 years of photos from my backup drives, and these blog posts are my only record of my birding / digiscoping adventures. So, don't forget to back up those image files, as well!