How To Back Up Your Blogger Blog

If you blog with Blogger, you know that your blog content is actually the property of Google:  that's the price of using the platform for free.  I'm sure you've heard of bloggers whose content vanished overnight (most recently, Melaine of My Sweet Savannah, who lost all her content and started over with a new blog url.  Today when I went to her blog to link back to her, I noticed the old blog is available again!  How frustrating!}  By content, I mean every blog post and photo a blogger has ever worked on for hours on end.  Sometimes Google can retrieve the content but occasionally everything just disappears into a great big black hole in cyberspace, never to be seen again.  As a Blogger blogger, you have no recourse with Google - the only thing you can do is protect yourself.

Don't risk losing this piece of you that you've worked hard on.  Back up your blog on a regular basis!
If you've never done it before, it's an easy process that takes all of 5 minutes.

1.  BACKUP YOUR BLOG CONTENT (POSTS/PHOTOS/COMMENTS):
I do this once a week, discarding the previous version each time.  That way if my blog blows up, I only lose the last few posts if any.

Go to your Blogger dashboard and choose Settings from the drop down menu.

When the Settings menu pops up, select Other.

At the top of the page, next to Blog Tools, click on Export blog.

 A window will pop up; select Download Blog.

After your blog has been successfully downloaded to your computer, you should see the file  (.xml) in the bottom left corner of your screen. *

And you are done!  You just saved your whole blog from disappearing forever into cyberspace!!  Congratulations!!

{"You did it!  Congratulations!!  World's best cup of coffee.  Great job everybody!  Great to meet you! Hi."-- name that movie.}

*If your browser is Safari, you may run into a problem saving the file.

When I first tried to back up my blog, instead of a file being saved to my computer, suddenly my RSS feed would pop up instead with all the posts and comments ever written on my blog.  When this happened repeatedly, I tried to copy and paste all of this into a word document, thinking I would at least have the content, but after blogging for almost three years (!) there was just too much. {When your computer saves the .xml file, the content is in html.}

Through a whole lot of research and Blogger help forum reading, I finally figured out that the feed was popping up instead of the file being saved properly due to a glitch in my browser - Safari.  The solution was to download another (free) browser (I chose Google Chrome), open Blogger from there and download the blog.  Worked like a charm.  Now I save a fresh copy of the blog content once a week, discarding the previously saved version.

2.  BACKUP YOUR BLOG TEMPLATE:
I recommend saving a copy of your blog template before fiddling with html or playing around with your blog design in any way.  That way if something goes horribly wrong, you have a copy saved to your computer.

Go to the Blogger dashboard and select Template from the drop down menu.

From the upper right hand corner, select Backup/Restore.

Choose Download full template from the pop up window.

The file should save automatically to your computer.

Save both files to a thumbdrive in case you have computer issues.

There you go - your blog is safe and sound!