A grave warning
Spare a thought, if you will, for a former colleague of mine, the Pop Cop. Obviously when we chipped away at the coal face of truth at the Scottish Daily Mirror, that wasn’t how we knew him.
However, for several years now that’s what he has been called as he pounded a cyber beat in search of new music and top tunes. (See what I did there..)
Anyhow, PC Pop built up quite a following, grew in confidence and experience and, basically, committed the best bits of his life to the world of blog.
Then disaster struck and his blog was taken down. In his words: “It feels like I’ve popped out to the shops to buy a loaf of bread and come home to discover the locks on my front door have been changed. However, my possessions are still inside and I want them back before they get torched.”
With no warning, Google – owner of Blogger – wiped the Pop Cop’s Police Station off the face of the blogosphere. PC Pop was understandable gutted. His story is told here and he’s calling for people to write to Google so, at the very least, he can get his content back.
It got me thinking, how would I feel if Bundance vanished in a puff of slightly smelly smoke? It would be awful. The thing has been many things to me in the three and a bit years I’ve been coming here and I’d hate to lose it.
I’m wondering what the best way to save blogs is and how something that doesn’t actually excist in real life can mean so much to me.
Well I'm a complete Luddite so can't help you with any technical stuff but poor Pop Cop. I would be very sad if TNMA suddenly disappeared – he must feel like he's lost a virtual arm. Hope Google co-operate.
Isnt there a way through blogger that you can save it to your hard drive? I think I read over on SITS about it. I've not done it myself as I fear doing something wrong and loosing my blog.
I'm intrested to see what people suggest so will be following the comments closely!
I would be totally devastated to lose my blog. Emma x
A blog is no different to anything else you create – you should always make a back-up.
Be aware that if you're using Blogger or Typepad and WordPress that isn't self-hosted then you are also letting someone else publish your site and should they go down, go out of business or judge that you breached their T&Cs, they can remove your content.
My advice is:
Once a month, export your blog content to another place. You could export it to your computer and then email the file to your GMAIL account. You might store a copy on a memory stick or other external hard drive.
This file can then be imported into a new blog relatively easily (although you'll often lose photos, which should be backed up separately) and formatting may need to be added back in.
This stuff seems to be going on a lot with google at the moment. Someone R manages lost all her wedding photos that were saved on some google facility (I'm so untechy!). Luckily, one of my good friends is in a posh job at google and he pulled some strings and managed to get them back for her – so it is possible.
Hope the pop blog comes back, and it's a lesson to all of us to back up.
Speaking of which, R once took a week off work to do a piece of work worth £2.5k and towards the end of the week our laptop got the blue screen of death. Of course, he hadn't backed up… very expensive way of learning an important lesson…
It seems to me to be another example of big corporations throwing their weight around and bullying the little people. It's unbelievable that there's no right of appeal or further investigation into such events.
Now I'm off to make a backup of my blog…
TNMA, it's a bit of a warning, isn't it? Some brilliant advice has been posted though.
Emma, Sally's come up with the goods.
Clair, just don't fall out with your brother.
Sally, thanks very much – your advice is spot on.
Jo, indeed – time to back up.
Glowstars, I think you're right. It's hard to trust some companies.
This is one of the reasons I'm going to move to WordPress and self hosting – I just don't want to risk losing my blog
Also meant to say I'm linking back to here in my latest Technophobes Training Club post where I'm talking about backing up blogs
This post has terrified me! I'd hate to lose my blog! Will definitely look into my options with regards to backing it up!
MAM,excellent resource, thanks.
Photopuddle, you wouldn't want to lose those beautiful pictures. Back up time.