If any of you tried accessing TipDiva.com from 3:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m EDT on
March 30, 2008, you may have found a 500 Internal Error, an empty WordPress blog
or nothing at all. Basically, Tip Diva tried updating WordPress via her web
host, and everything went kablooey. Luckily, after hours on the phone and a big
headache, she had a database backup and was able to restore her blog - but some
bloggers aren’t that lucky. Here’s how to back up your blog and avoid future
nightmares:
- Back Up Your Blog Via Its Service - Your blog service,
whether
WordPress,
Blogger,
LiveJournal or another, has different ways of backing up your data.
Google backing up (your service) to
find out how to back up your posts. - Back Up Your Database Via Your Host - Contact your
blog’s host to find out the best way to back up you blog’s database - most
likely an SQL file. Back it up regularly just in case there’s a crash or a
problem after an update. - Store Backup In Different Places - E-mail your backup
to yourself, burn it disk, FTP it to your web space - just make sure you
have more than one copy, just in case. Tip Diva e-mails her to a
Gmail and
Yahoo! account because of
their seemingly unlimited storage space. - Use Feedburner To Get Your Posts Delivered Via E-Mail -
Sign up for your feed via
Feedburner to get
your posts delivered to you via e-mail every time you post. This is a good
backup method in case any posts go missing, and you’ll know which days they
were posted. - Cross-Post To Another Blog - One way to save your
information is to cross-post it to a free blog, like LiveJournal or Blogger.
But if it’s important that your blog shows up in Google search results, Tip
Diva does not recommend this step, because
Google hates duplicate content. - Use A Blog Publishing Program - There are many blog
publishing programs that you can run from your desktop in order to post to
your blog. Tip Diva, for one, uses
BlogDesk,
which archives all of her posts for her. - Save Your Posts In Text Files - If you do not want to
use a blog publishing program, you may want to back up your posts by copying
them into a .txt or Word document and saving them to your hard drive. Don’t
forget to
back up your computer regularly, as well. - Check The Google Cache - You can sometimes recovered
posts cached by Google. Search for the blog post (in this instance, we’ll
search for
Tip Diva’s Top Ten Tips - Eating Healthy On A Budget), and if Google has
a cached version of the page, you’ll see a little light-purple link
underneath the URL. Click on it to recover the cached post, but you’ll want
to do this ASAP, before Google caches the dead page. - Check The Wayback Machine - Another way to check for
cached pages is through the Wayback Machine at
Archive.org. Put in
your blog’s URL, and you may have cached versions of the site. - If All Else Fails, You May Have To Pay Or Start
From Scratch - Sometimes, you’re not able to recover any backups or
posts. You may just have to pay your web host to get your blog up and
running again (for instance,
GoDaddy charges $150)
or start your blog from scratch, neither which is an attractive option.
Avoid both by backing up regularly.
Postingan
