More on the Importance of Regular Backing Up

My gosh! A couple of days ago I wrote about how a fellow blogger had basically lost their entire blog and was working on using cached versions to rebuild it.  That same day I was tinkering around on Twitter as I do most days when a tweet came down that Blogertery operated by Toronto-resident Alexander Yusupov, a Wordpress platform that supported 73,000 was being reinstated.  Apparently on July 9, 2010 their Pennsylvania-based web host, BurstNET shut down Blogertey due to FBI allegations that the terrorist group al-Qaeda used the blogs to distribute terrorist activities.  Well the good news is Blogerty is back but I can't imagine what bloggers went through during that experience.

• First their blogs simply vanished so if they did not make some type of regular off of Blogerty's site to backup their blogs then all their hard word could have been gone. 
• Second the bloggers on this network were considered guilty before being proved to be guilty.  Let's say that 10% of the bloggers in that system were terrorists to some degree or other.  That means 90% had absolutely nothing to do with terrorism and were simply using a blogging host they were comfortable with.  
• Third and this is very important is in reality this type of thing could happen to any blog host.
• Fourth, you cannot rely on others to backup your blog in the way of cached versions.  You must do it yourself!

I honestly feel sorry for all those on Blogertery who had their blogging activities interrupted because of these allegations.  Just the shear stress of waking up to find your blog no longer existed would be horrible!  They lost over a month of readership and traffic that would have cost them money as well if they were running paid advertising on their blogs.

My backup system is likely not fool proof but here are a few things I do:

• Every image used on my blog is saved on my home computer.
• Every post I make is emailed to me as soon as it is published.
• Every comment is emailed to me for moderation.
• I make regular backups through Blogger for both template and blog content. 
• Every extra script on my blog is backed up with a copy on my computer.

At least this way I could restore most of my blogs without relying on cached copies.  Even comments on my blogs are downloaded through Blogger's system both via email and backups.  So while it would be a bit of a pain restoring any of my blogs would be quite doable to the point they would look pretty much the way they do now.  At any rate it pays in terms of peace of mind to keep several backups of your blog just in case.

Garden Gnome
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