Social media, SEO, marketing and writingRSS Yourself: A Blogger’s Secret Backup Weapon
I was reading a sarcastic (and slightly sad) blog post today about a gal who lost the entire contents of her blog after a catastrophic server failure happened while she was ‘upgrading’ her blog to a more ‘robust’ and costly ISP solution.
While reading, I had to cringe because I really feel her pain. Something similar happened to me once when I lost 90% of my blog content when some lowly server administrator inadvertently deleted the content on a remote hosted server because he thought that shiny piece of hardware wasn’t being used.
Needless to say, upon hearing the news, I was devastated!
Thankfully, I had set up an RSS feed to my own blog via Google Reader, so I had an electronic copy of all my entire site content (plus all my images) for every blog post I had published over the prior 18 months. Yes sir, there is a God.
With a little technical assistance, I was able to export all my blog posts and import them back into Wordpress as soon as my new server (on a different ISP) was up and running. All I had to do was go in and reassign dates for each post, plus add back deleted hyperlinks. A pain, no doubt, but something I was more than happy to do considering the circumstances.
Who knew Google Reader and RSS feeds were every blogger’s secret backup weapon? I didn’t. So now I pass this nugget of knowledge on to you, my young padawons (Jedi backup apprentices). If you need an inexpensive backup and archiving service for your blog, set up an RSS feed and save it into a reader and you may just thank your lucky stars one day.
