How To Backup the Entire Blogger Blog?

One morning you wake up to find out that your blog has been hacked and all the data is lost. Still there is smile on your face. You open your back up vault on your laptop, and restore the whole blog in 10 minutes. This can happen to anybody and the consequences of not backing up your blog can be disastrous. Unfortunately, a large number of bloggers do not formulate any back up and restoration policy. If you are hosting your blog on Wordpress platform, there are 2-3 back up plugins available that can be easily configured. On the other hand, if your blog is on blogger platform, you will find it difficult to create a single point restoration point for your blog. But there is a solution to this problem. Let us see how to back up the entire blogger blog, for easy restoration in case of any mishap.

Planning The Backup Strategy

A good backup strategy can save you from lot of pain, in case any disaster happens. A big question that you may ask while formulating any backup policy will be, "How often should I take backup?". If your blog is new, you can afford to take backups every fortnight or on weekly basis. On the other hand, if it's an established blog with high traffic volume, daily backups are must.

Backup procedure

At present blog export function is available in draft version of blogger. Generally, features available in draft are in developmental stage and should not be tried on your main blog having good traffic. Still, you can use the following tried and tested technique to back up your entire blog posts and comments in a single file.

Step - 1 Save you existing template on local drive.
Step - 2 Replace your entire template code with the following code.

AUTHOR: <$BlogItemAuthor$>
DATE: <$BlogItemDateTime$>
-----
BODY:
<$BlogItemBody$>
--------

NOTE: Remove any indentations present in the above code after pasting it in your blog template

Step - 3 If you are using blogger native commenting system and want to backup them as well, paste the following code just above the tag.

COMMENT-AUTHOR:<$BlogCommentAuthor$>
COMMENT-DATE:<$BlogCommentDateTime$>
COMMENT-BODY:<$BlogCommentBody$>
--------

Step - 4 Our goal is to adjust the blog settings in such a way that all the posts get displayed on the index page. To achieve that, go to Settings -> Formatting and choose days on the main page option. Set the number of days to 1 more than the number of days you are blogging.

Step - 5 In Settings -> Formatting set the Date/Time format to MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS.

Make a note of existing Date/Time settings, so that they can be easily restored later

Step - 6 In Settings -> Formatting set the option Convert line breaks to No.

Step - 7 Set the Archive Frequency to No Archive in Settings -> Archiving, so that old archive is not overwritten.

Now, publish your blog and you will get a single index page with all the posts and comments on that page. Simply save the source of that page in local hard drive, and all your blog posts and comments will be saved in that single file.

After saving the index page, simply restore your previous settings in Settings -> Formatting and Settings -> Archiving pages. Restore your original template that you saved earlier. Done.