Backing up your Blogger hosted blog is certainly reassuring! Unlike other blogging platforms, Blogger does not feature a backup facility though. Luckily I've discovered three highly useful and workable solutions which you could use to backup and restore your Blogger posts. One of these even allows you to import posts from Wordpress or Typepad powered blogs!
Create Backups using your XML Feed
Google Operating System has written an extensive post describing how to backup your Blogger posts, comments and images using your blog's XML feed.
This method would allow you to import these posts to a database, or simply copy and paste the content if you ever need to restore your Blogger posts.
Read more about backing up using your XML feeds.
Blogger Backup Utility
Blogger Backup is a free utility you can download which will create a backup of all your Blogger posts and save these to a location on your computer. This program uses the GData C# Library, and saves each post to a local Atom/XML file.
Once you have created a full backup of your posts, you can then use this program to restore your posts, or import to another Blogger powered blog.
You can also make a backup of any comments though there is currently not the facility to restore comments automatically (you would need to restore them manually instead).
You can download the most recent release of Blogger Backup here.
Blog2Blog Backup, Restore and Import Utility
Of these three methods, Blog2Blog is my absolute favorite (and for very good reasons!).
Paul Cooley of LinuxLore created this free utility which allows you to:
- Backup and restore your Blogger posts
- Import from Wordpress and export to Blogger
- Import from Blogger and export to Wordpress
- Import from LiveJournal and export to Blogger/Wordpress
- Publish to Microsoft Live Spaces
I've tested this on Blogger and Wordpress blogs (both Wordpress.com and self-hosted Wordpress) with great success.
I was very impressed by the range of features Paul has included in this utility, which includes a simple read-only viewer of downloaded entries and delete all entries for your destination journal.
Blog2Blog is a .NET 2.0 application and is available for free download. Backups are saved on your own computer and this is a breeze to install and operate (though of course, if you have a large number of posts it may take some time to import them!).
Read more about Blog2Blog and download this free utility.
Important Notes
If you use either Blogger Backup or Blog2Blog to restore your Blogger posts, you will be limited to 50 posts per day. This limit is imposed by Blogger to prevent spamming, and ensure the smooth-running of the API.
If you do have a great deal of posts to import to your Blogger blog, you may be able to ask permission for temporary lifting of this limit. A good place to ask about this would be the Blogger Developer forum (you're unlikely to receive a response elsewhere).
Why you should backup your Blogger posts?
Blogger powered blogs do not expire, and will not be deleted from the system if they are abandoned. But if you accidentally delete your blog or for some reason your blog becomes inaccessible, it would certainly be reassuring to know that you have a local backup of all your posts and can restore this if required.
Always backup your Blogger template!
It is also a good idea to backup your Blogger template (especially before attempting any template customizations). Download a copy of your template to your computer, which you can access in the future if you need to restore your theme (or your entire blog).
For Blogger XML based templates (Layouts):
Go to Layout>Edit HTML in your Blogger dashboard, then click on the link near the top of the page which says "Download Full Template". This will save a copy of your full template as an XML file to your computer.
For Classic Blogger Templates:
Go to Template>Edit HTML in your Blogger dashboard. Highlight all of the code in the box, copy this and paste into a simple text file. Then save this .TXT file to your computer.
If you have discovered any other useful backup/restore facilities for use with Blogger blogs, please let us know about these by leaving your comments below.
15 Comments:
Nice post :) Considering transferring from blogger to WP and was wondering how to achieve that, now my problem is solved! thanks...
Hi Amanda,
Thanks for all the great info plus all the extra impressive resources you have been steadily adding. Have alway wanted to publish stuff about your posts and great templates, but see Why your comments and emails are not getting prompt responses.
Regarding this post, it mentioned importing and exporting, and to me it sound fishily like publishing duplicate content. How would this affect search engines?
BTW, hoping to convert my major blogs to your template with built-in tabs to replace Ramani's of Hackosphere 3 column Minima template. I sincerely believe you are doing much better than Ramani who I believe earned the distinction of coming up with the first Blogger Beta (now out of beta) hack.
Peter Blog*Star
Blogger Tips and Tricks
Hi Amanda,
Based on what I have been reading at BloggerBuster, I had long ago predicted that very soon, BloggerBuster will catch up and overtake Blogger Tips and Tricks (PageRank 4) and Blogger for Dummies (surprisingly PageRank 6 although almost abandoned in favor of above). I just checked PageRank of BloggerBuster and it is now 4. I think BloggerBuster deserve a higher PageRank than a (relatively) miserable 4.
Peter Blog*Star
Testing Blogger Beta (now New Blogger)
Hi,
Why don`t you try http://www.backupsol.net
If`s a professional backup service where you can backup everything and it is fully encrypted with the manager SECURICO..
I used a freeware called Getleft that worked really well as a backup. I have a huge blog so it took awhile. I went out and came back a couple of hours later to find it all done and loaded up on my hard drive.
Hi Laura,
That is nice extra info you provided, but would like to know more. Can you use the backup file to restore? I used to recommend BlogCollecor but am unhappy that up till now they still haven't provided the means to use it to restore the blog. Or maybe they have but did not update me even though I asked for it.
Peter Blog*Star
Blogger for Dummies
For Peter: Thank you for the vote of confidence! I'm glad to know you find the content here to be useful.
I do try not to be too concerned with PageRank. For about six months this blog did not have any PageRank as I had missed out on last year's early PR update, so I am simply happy to be included in Google's index and have some regular readers.
Which was the template you were interested to use? I'm sure you could add navigation tabs to any template by altering the template code. Annie of BlogU posted a great explanation recently which you can read about here.
For Ianchov and Laura: Thank you for letting us know about these services. If it is possible to use these services to back up posts as XML based files, it may be possible to restore these posts using Blogger Restore or Blog2Blog. I'll look into this possibility to see if this would work.
Thank you all for your stopping by to leave your comments here!
Best wishes,
Amanda
Hi Amanda
Everytime I need to learn how to do something on my blog I search the net yet always seem to end up finding the answer at Bloggerbuster. Just wanted to say a big thanks!
regards
Al
Hi Amanda ! I'm still fairly new at Blogger and thanks to all your tutorials I manage to make a nice blog....but unfortunately I recently made a huge stupid mistake ! I deleted it ! Would you be able to help me recover it ? Is there away how to ? Thanks for your time !
Hi,
I wrote these http://tjantunen.com/2007/03/21/import-blogger-posts-to-wordpress/
simple instructions how to import blogger beta posts to wordpress easily and without using any plugins.
Hi,
You really saved my life! Thank you for these infos :) I use Blogger Backup now& it works well.. I just wonder if you can tell me how to restore comments manually?
Thanks again.
Can you please help with suggestions on how to restore 100 posts I accidentally deleted? Thought I was deleting labels, but posts disappeared without warning. They're also gone from the cache, but I did salvage 14 posts in a txt file.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Love your site.
Thanks,
Lulubelle B
http://lulu-haiku.blogspot.com
i have download but how do i restore i mean i want to publish all the post which i have loose..........how do i do that please guide me
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