How To : Backup your blog

When you’re not hosting your own weblog and using a web-based blogging tool like Blogger, for backup you can create a local mirror of the web site on your computer.

There are a million utilities out there that can do this. For Mac OS X users who don’t want to wrangle with the command line, I’d recommend this free application called WebGrabber. Download WebGrabber and start it up. Give it your site’s address, tell it where to download it, set any other options and watch it save your web site to your computer. (Be sure to check the “Stay on specified site” box so you don’t go downloading every page you link to from your blog, too.) The nice thing about WebGrabber is once you do an initial backup, every time you back up after that you can choose “Sync up with previous download” to update your backup (versus mirroring the whole site again.)

Windows users in the same boat: to you I recommend the free HTTrack, “the web site copier,” which has similar functionality.

Each of these applications will create a fully working, interlinked local copy of your blog for browsing offline.

Have fun backing up!

Die Dulci Fruere