Here’s a really simply and easy to implement way to back up your blog using two of my favorite tools: Gmail and Feedburner. There are many ways you can go about backing up your blog right now, such as using an online tool like BlogBackupOnline, using WordPress plugins like WP Database Backup, or by simply using FTP to download everything to your computer.
All of the above-mentioned methods are the RECOMMENDED ways to back up your blog by me and just about everyone else, but all too many times people get lazy and end up neglecting this very important procedure! It’s happened to me once and I almost lost my entire site simply because I was not backing up my blog routinely.
However, even with this knowledge, there are some days that I do not get a chance to back up my latest posts because of various reasons. In this case if my I were to lose everything on my hosting server (I have a daily backup scheduled on my hosting site, but they have lost all of their backups at one point too) , I would end up losing a day or two worth of posts written. Losing 2 days worth of posts is still quite a bit considering it’s about 4 to 5 actual posts.
So while playing around and trying to figure out a method where I could have my posts automatically backed up locally (not on my hosting site’s servers) without having to use FTP or run a plugin or basically do anything manually, I came up with a very simple solution: subscribe to my Feedburner email subscription with a Gmail address that includes a label that will be automatically filtered to my archives when it comes in.
Using your Feedburner email subscription, any new posts you publish will automatically be sent to your subscribers. Add yourself in with your normal Gmail address plus a label, i.e. Aseem1234+blogbackup@gmail.com and have it filtered to your archives! Viola! Now your entire posts will be emailed to you and saved in your Google account whenever you publish.
Of course in order to set this up, you’ll need to be using Feedburner to manage your feeds. However, I think that most bloggers including Blogger bloggers now use Feedburner to manage all of their feeds. To setup email subscriptions on your feed, log into Feedburner and click on the Publicize tab. You’ll see the option Email Subscriptions in the left menu.
FeedBurner has specific instructions on how to set it up for WordPress, Blogger, and TypePad. If you need more information on how to set it up, just search in Google.
Once you have that setup, let’s go to your Gmail account and setup a new label and filter. Once logged in, click on Edit Labels at the bottom left of them Gmail screen.
Under Create a new label, type in the word “blogbackup” as one word. You can choose a different label if you like, just keep using that for the next step also.
Click Create to create the new label. Now click on Filters from the Settings menu to setup the filter. Click Create a New Filter at the bottom. For Step 1, enter your email address followed by a “+” sign and the word for your label, in our case “blogbackup” into the To: box. It should look like this:
Click Next step and check off “Skip the Inbox (Archive it)” to have the emails automatically moved from your Inbox to the archived folder. Also, check “Apply the Label” and choose the label we just created, blogbackup.
Click Create Filter and you’re done. Now go ahead and test it by sending an email to MyEmailAdd+blogbackup@gmail.com and you should see it go directly to your archives with the label blogbackup for easy access.
A very simple method to backup your blog posts and should only be used to complement other blog backup strategies, but useful in case your blog backup is a few days old when you lose everything. You can think of this as a kind of differential backup!
No comments:
Post a Comment