Back-Up Your Blog

Or risk losing thousands of hours of inspiration, perspiration, and motivation.

Today I deleted two blogs.  It was tough to do this because these blogs were my foray into the world of blogging.  However, both were specific to my landscape business, which I sold two years ago next week.  And while I extensively speak and consult to the green industry, from a subject matter standpoint, this blog is where my focus is.

Deleting those blogs was just as easy as deleting a document.  One push to get to the "Are you sure?" level, and then one more to get rid of them forever.  I did the same with the RSS feeds at Feedburner, which was equally scary.  Why? 

I just wanted to be absolutely certain that this blog – jeffkorhan.com, is here for as long as I'm on this planet, and maybe longer.  So, that got me thinking about safeguarding my inspiration and hard work.  After all, this blog is my legacy of hard work.

Back It Up

Do yourself a favor – back up your blog.  And then back that back-up to the cloud.  I personally find Jungledisk to be a joy to use.  Unlike other Web based back-up services such as Mozy, Jungledisk is a virtual hard-drive.  This means you get your data back within minutes.  With Mozy and others like it, plan on approximately 4 hours or more.  That just isn't acceptable if I have a crisis just before a presentation.

WordPress Back-Up

Sometime soon I am going to write a post that will give an objective side-by-side comparison of the blogging platform I use and recommend, which is TypePad, and the other one with legions of fans – WordPress.  I use both now, as I'm a guest blogger on several WordPress platforms.  I will write that post after I build a WordPress blog next week, which will allow me to objectively compare with the dozens of TypePad blogs I've built.

Let's first look at the method for backing up a WordPress blog.  (Click on both images to enlarge.)

This is step one of approximately ten necessary steps.  While it is laid out very clearly, you can see from the sidebar that you will still have to answer questions related to SQL, plug-ins, and things like that.  If you don't know what those are, then you get my point.   

Most important is what is written at the top of this screenshot.  "It is strongly recommended you back-up your blog at regular intervals and before an upgrade."  As you can imagine, you can actually lose all of your data when making an upgrade to your WordPress blog, which is something you have to do to stay ahead of viruses and the like.

I covered this in detail after Mashable broke a trending story on a WordPress virus last year.  Here's my post recommending WordPress users take action.

TypePad Back-Up

As you may have surmised, I prefer TypePad.  I don't have to worry about upgrades or viruses.  TypePad takes care of that.  Better yet, the procedure for backing up your TypePad blog is extremely simple. 

You push one button and that's it!  You are presented with a .txt file that you then save to your hard drive.  As long as you do that every now and then, Jungledisk automatically takes care of the rest. 

 
Furthermore, you can see it is also a simple matter to import your blog to TypePad.  If you decide to do so, please click on the banner on the bottom of the center blue column of this blog to get a free 14 day Typepad trial.  Yes, I get a commission if you sign up.

I suppose that is my reward for recommending a blog platform that will make your blogging life a little easier —

And safer.