Friday 20 November 2009

Blog Protection

I got an email the other day from the husband of a dear friend, Joanne. Rick, a fellow blogger, wrote:

I've always wondered what would happen if Blogger decided to go away or they had a crash of their server. Previously, when I was on AOL, I had a couple of webpages set up, one for me and one for the dogs. Without notice AOL decided to discontinue this service and everything on those sites was lost.

Anyway, a RV friend that I keep track of came up with a website that will convert the blogs to either written form or to .pdf files that you can store. Of course, this is for a fee. Here is what Rod sent:

"We have often wondered what would happen in all of a sudden the provider of our blog would disappear along with our blog. We would sure hate to lose almost five years of our adventure blogs.

"Have been looking at ways to simply archive our blog. We found this site http://blog2print.sharedbook.com/blogworld/printmyblog/index.html

"The site will print out your blog for a healthy price but an option is to create a PDF file for a very reasonable price of $7.95

"Took the plunge and got a PDF file of this summer's Alaska trip. Was well pleased and now will get a file for all our blogs. The file for the three months was 144 pages long and 47MB so is a big file to download.

"If interested you can go to the website and do a trial run. The result can be put in first to last or last to first, pictures appear as they appear in the blog and can not be enlarged, pictures don't appear in exactly the position as when viewed in blog format, can add cover photos, title, introductions."

This is me (Rick) again. Being on the cheap side I decided I can do this myself. Last night I was able to go in and pull up each blog from the past three years and print them out. I now have them in a loose leaf notebook where I can add to them. Additionally, I have a copy of Adobe that allows me to make my own .pdf files. In the next couple of weeks I'm going to convert each blog entry to a .pdf file and then store them on a flash drive.

Not that my ramblings are all that earth shattering but I have put a lot of work into them over the past three years and have found it interesting to go back and re-read them on the different trips we've taken. I'm sure you probably feel the same about your blogs so I'd thought I pass this information on.

This me (Shelley): I do treasure my blog, strangely, and enjoy re-reading what I've written even if it wasn't that long ago. I've attempted backing the blog up just calling up a month's worth of posts, highlighting it all and copying it into Word documents. This is what has allowed me to replace pictures that have been accidentally deleted.

Now that other bloggers are beginning to come by for a visit, I just thought I'd ask:

How do you back up your blog?

3 comments:

FB @ FabulouslyBroke.com said...

I just click "Backup" on Wordpress.

In Blogger, I did the same thing and got an atom file with all my posts

But if you want each page by page in an actual book rather than digital.. I suppose that service isn't such a bad idea. And quite cheap.

I don't preserve my posts at all for future memory - Google does that for me ;)

Can't really erase things from Google :P

TKW said...

Gulp. Back up my blog? Never even crossed my mind...

Rick Stone said...

I did get the .pdf files done. Actually it took less time to convert each blog entry into a .pdf than it did to print out a hard copy. I've got them all on a 1GB flash drive and even with over 160 separate files I have barely started on filling up the flash drive.

BTW, I do the same with all the pictures I take on our RV travels. I put each trips pics in a file and then copy that file to a flash drive. Right now I've got an 8GB drive nearly full and have a 4GB ready to go next.