In my previous article, I shared the horror of data loss with you. However, my willingness to backup my data has saved me. I hope that none of you have to experience that, but if you do, this will have been a worthy read. This article is dedicated to helping you keep your blog safe. The stories of data loss are growing in numbers. If things go wrong, you will be prepared, and you will be able to brag that you saved your data from extinction.

I will be discussing manual and automated solutions for accomplishing the task of backing up your blog. A manual solution has a much higher chance of being a perfect one-to-one copy if done correctly, and as a result, it should be performed regardless of whether or not you have an automated solution in place. The automated solutions are much easier and require little to no maintenance, but are not guaranteed to work correctly.

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The results of all those hours spent typing away in a word processor to inform and entertain an audience should be of great value to us all. However, it is amazing how careless some of us can be. I just realized that my carelessness could have cost me several months of work and dedication. It was all flushed down the drain within hours. To everyone who runs a blog: please read this, and learn from what was almost a huge disaster.

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Share application data via the Internet.
Survive disaster scenarios.

Make email webworker ready everywhere!

The title tells a whole dramatic story in seven words. Let's talk about which desktop applications to sync with which services over the Internet to reach redundancy on an application AND work level.

This scenario could become a series: Your house burns down. How to work on with the help of the Internet.

Today: Mail provider -> mail client = mail backup and fallback solution

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Oops, my article was deleted by i.e. Akismet.
Do you have an automatic backup solution?

My backup is my feed reader

I wrote an article in 2006 about a simple solution to create a backup while writing an article: Productivity: Clipboard as Auto Save. Now I stumbled over another great possibility to automatically backup my articles. My preferred feed reader BlogBridge offers the great feature to automatically save incoming feed items. Edit: Checking the BlogBridge service plan I see that you need at least the basic plan for $5/3months (which I have) to get the described feature.

BlogBridge can automatically save articles and/or enclosures.

How-To backup a feed with BlogBridge

1. Select a feed.
2. Go to the feed properties.
3. Choose the 'Advanced' tab.
4. Activate 'Automatically save articles' and /or enclosures
5. Choose a folder where to store the articles. In my case it is ".../Text/Backup - Performancing/from BlogBridge".
6. Choose a file format. In my case it is "YYYY-MM-DD - Title".

Bingo. Say 'OK' and you are done.

• In the future every new incoming feed item is stored as an HTML file.
• All the formatting is saved!

Of course you have to have a full feed to get this backup plan working.

Bonus: ReBlogging with BlogBridge

BlogBridge as archive and research tool.

• If you have one of the pro-versions of BlogBridge you are able to post to your blog.
• Select an article, push 'B' and an editor will pop up.
• Edit the content as you like and then you are ready to post.
• Archive and/or research solution: For your own feeds I recommend to set a high purge limit. For my performancing.com blog the setting is '500'.

How great is that?