I’m declaring the 13th of each month as the unofficial blog backup day. Meaning that you should login to your blog software and download a backup of all posts. Also, if you have access to the template files, back those up too.

Avoiding issues are much easier than trying to fix them once they happen. I’ve never seen a blog just delete itself, but I have heard of people’s hosting accounts suddenly having a hardware failure and are non-recoverable. If you don’t have a backup of your files, who does?

Yes, a good host will make backups, but that’s placing your trust fully in a third party. What if their backups are in the same office as your website and they have a fire? All is lost. If you do have a good host, then a secondary set of backups never hurt and you’ll have them at your fingertips at all times.

Ok, so this is a perfect gloom post for Friday the 13th, but you must realize that technology isn’t perfect. Your blog could go down and if you have no backup, then you’ll have to start from zero. All your hard work down the drain.

How do you backup a blog?

For Wordpress blogs, use the the WordPress Database Backup plugin. This plugin is included with all installs of Wordpress starting with version 2 I believe. Once enabled, you just go tot he backups section of the manage screen, make a few selections and it’ll backup your blog posts to your desktop or email. I wouldn’t suggest backing up to the server as that won’t do you any good if your web server goes down.

For Wordpress.com blogs, click on Manage and then Export.

With TypePad just got to the Import/Export area on the Manage tab of your admin area. Here you’ll be able to export all posts to your desktop. [backup support page]

Movable Type users can login to their admin area and click on Import/Export and then select Export.

Blogger doesn’t allow an export of all your posts like other services. However, you can edit your template with a bit of custom code to output all posts on one page, then save that page and revert back to your old template. Not the best solution but it should work. [Blogger How-To Page]