Backing Up Your Blog

Every writer's nightmare is to have something they've written dissapear or worse, be hacked and messed with. But how many of you bloggers out there worry about it? Not many? Well you should. It's one of those things that no one thinks can or will happen to them, then it does.

I always thought no one would mess with my blog because I'm just a harmless writer who blogs about writing and books. I thought after I got published I would worry about things like people hacking my blog. But then an author friend of mine who was weeks away from debuting, had her blog hacked. She couldn't log in. They'd changed her passwords and messed with everything! It wasn't a friendly joke either. She lost material she'd written years ago. It threw off what she had planned to do on her blog for her debut.

Ever since that happened to her I've been backing up my blog. It's easy, even for non technical types so don't worry! I'll walk you through how to back up a Blogger blog.

1) Log into your account. From your dashboard (the log-in page) click on Settings.
2) In the Tools section on top of the screen click on Export Blog.
3) Click on Save Blog. It may ask if you want to view or save, click on save.
4) It may ask what you want to save it as and at this point it should suggest either the name of your blog, or just 'Blog' along with the date. In this same screen it will show where it's saving it, most likely your documents.

Now you'll have a back up of your blog saved on your own computer in your documents. I recommend saving to it often. Just go through the prompts and save it to the same document. That way it will replace the old one with the new one. I save mine weekly, but you can save it after each post if you like.

If you have a different blog than Blogger check out this in depth post on Chuck Samubchino's (Writer's Digest) blog that runs through each type of blogging account.