Thursday 2 November 2006

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Backup your entire Blogger blog in under 2 minutes

For my next party trick I'm going to show you how to perform an entire backup of your Blogspot (aka Google's Blogger) blog in three idiot-proof steps.

This technique requires no software other than a web browser so you can put your offline site sucking tools back in their box. Neither will any template modifications or configuration alterations be necessary. Your backup will consist of a single html page containing every entry ever published in sequential order, a handful of miscellaneous CSS files, plus any images you have posted, no matter where they are hosted.

Should disaster strike you won't be able to use your backup to instantly restore you.blogspot.com as you might with an automated import script, but likewise this would be the case if you instead chose to follow Google's tortuous advice (link now dead and not saved by archive.org), or employed an offline browser (which I should point out would save multiple copies of the same posts in addition to all kinds of superfluous fluff).
Here's the procedure...

1. Scroll downwards through the list of dates in your 'blog archive' sidebar until you reach the year in which you began posting and click on the link.
The URL - minus the spaces which have been inserted to trigger word wrapping - in your address bar will look a lot like this:
http://kookosity.blogspot.com/ search?updated-min= 1999-01-01 T00%3A00%3A00Z&updated-max= 2000-01-01 T00%3A00%3A00Z&max-results=13
2. The URL in this example instructs Blogger to display all the posts created between the first day of 1999 and the first day of 2000, though if you extend the 'updated-max' date to reflect the date of your most recent post (or just set it way ahead into the future) and boost the 'max-results' limit to include all your entries you can force Blogger to cram everything onto one page.

3. Make your adjustments, press return and then save the output in "web page, complete" format (if you're using Firefox) to a safe place on your hard drive.

The result will look identical to its online counterpart so can easily be absorbed by the naked-eye (as opposed to an RSS interpreter for example). Beats pulling rabbits out of a top hat, eh.

30 comments:

Video Blogger said...

How where you able to add that image inside the header, and how where you able to remove the title.

dreamkatcha said...

How to insert an image into the header is explained here.

To prevent your blog title and description from appearing you have to comment out the template code which instructs Blogger to insert them into the header. More info here.

Hope that helps.

justin farrow-realtor [NYC] said...

Great idea! However I'm having a little trouble getting the URL like the example you have listed. My blog is at http://urbanfoto.blogspot.com Not quite sure how to get that longer URL when I click the last archive button.....any suggestions?
this is all I get:
http://urbanfoto.blogspot.com/2005_02_13_archive.html
Great Tip...just wish it worked for me...i'd love to have a complete archive of this blog that i stopped posting on long ago....

dreamkatcha said...

Hi,

It looks you need to change your blog archive settings from 'flat list' to 'hierarchy' so that the month links turn into search query URLs. You can do this in the 'template' > 'page elements' menu. This must have been the default setting for the Denim template (the one I'm using) so I didn't notice there was a difference.

Even so you can copy and paste the query string to the end of your URL to achieve the same thing without editing your layout if you prefer it the way it is. Here's an example URL you might want to try.

This would return all your posts (up to 3000 entries in this case) from when you begin blogging to an arbitrary date way off in the future (2010).

Hope that helps. :)

Sundry said...

This is brilliant! Whew! Mind if I link to this post from my blog?

dreamkatcha said...

Not at all. Feel free to spread the word. :)

Anonymous said...

Thanks. I have search for backup method and find that this method is the easiest as you pointed out, no need to install software or modify your template.

nqdn said...

Thanks!
It works well, but i coudn´t save coments associated with the posts. How do i do it?

dreamkatcha said...

Ah, I hadn't thought about that. I suppose you'd have to edit your template so comments are appended to the bottom of each post and always visible rather than on a separate page.

nqdn said...

And how?

nqdn said...

If you please, of course!

dreamkatcha said...

Ah yes, that might be handy to know. It used to be a very simple template tweak with classic Blogger, but now there are quite a few extra hoops to jump through to achieve the same effect. The Peek-a-Boo comments hack could be the way to go. Hope it does the trick. :)

nqdn said...

I didn´t made the test yet, but i've apreciated your help.
Thank you very much!

Anonymous said...

Thanks, it works nice, the backup method you decribed.

Micke / Sweden

Kc said...

Is there a way to reverse the order so you have the first post first?

dreamkatcha said...

I've tried chopping up and rearranging the command string, but to no avail. I either get a syntax/404 error or the instruction is ignored and all I see is my blog as it would look from the index page, sorry. :(

Si and Clare said...

Cheers mate, works a treat!!

BorderWars said...

This is clearly the most simple and easiest backup method. Thanks much.

It's a shame that blogger doesn't have this as a feature that can be imported and exported so it will truly be a backup, with the ability to restore it in case of blogger going down or even the option to delete/reinstate/move your blog and bring your posts with you.

Barring that (which would require blogger coders to get off their rear ends) you're DUH, SO EASY solution is, duh, soooo easy.

Thanks.

Baker Mommy said...

Is there a way to use this backup method in Internet Explorer? If so, how do I save the URL as a web page? I ultimately want to download it to a CD to keep forever. How can I achieve this? Thanks!

dreamkatcha said...

baker mommy, there's no reason the procedure should be any different using Internet Explorer as long as your blog's layout uses the 'hierarchy' style archive page element.

Anonymous said...

SO HELPFUL! I realize this info is a little old, but it's still the easiest method I found. Thank you!

Meredith Simonds said...

I love how simple it is, but what does it mean when I try to save it to my hard drive and it says "The Web page could not be saved to the selected location." I've tried in My Documents and in specific file folders, but it always says the same thing. Could it be because I don't have enough memory on my computer? Thank you.

dreamkatcha said...

Meredith, it's a bug which crops up with older versions of Internet Explorer. The solution is explained here. Alternatively switch to a more advanced, standards compliant browser such as Firefox.

Hope that helps. :)

M. said...

Easy as pie. But could this backup be used to migrate the content to another Blogger blog?

dreamkatcha said...

No, unfortunately there's no function built into the Blogger control panel that would let you import the output of this backup method.

Think of it as a kind of screen grab. If the unthinkable happened you could use this backup to reproduce your blog, but it would be a slow, arduous process to re-post everything.

abbie said...

thanks for your help! =) this is exactly what i was looking for. i don't know why i didn't think of it.

Bill Kerr said...

thank you - it worked for me but not sure about how to get the comments

I couldn't get the official google method in blogger Help to work at all

Chris said...

Another way to backup an entire blog may be to switch to ftp publishing (to your free webspace?) (need to switch to classic template, download existing template first) then publish everything to your webspace. Switch back to blogger hosted publishing, leaving backup available for downloading via ftp program for burning to cd?

Don't try this at home without experimenting frst on a test blog!

Chris

IfeelMystuff said...

That just saved me a lot of time.

Thanks!

Eshwar said...

Brilliant!