Tuesday, 18 October 2011

How To Backup Your Blogger Blog And Print Your Whole Blog


Update: Blogger has introduced an easy export and import functions for you to easily save a backup copy of your blog in xml format and easily import it back into Blogger. Sign into Dashboard > Settings > Basic and the Export/Import/delete blog will be at the top, just under the tabs:



Save the 
xml file in a suitable folder in your computer and use it to export to your blog if the situation requires it.

Regarding printing as PDF file and also hard copies, Blogger has partnered with Blog2Print for you to easily convert it to pdf format and also to print hard copies. Go to Blog2Print


For instruction on how to backup your whole blog, convert it into a PDF file and print it in one go, refer to BlogCollector below.


Why backup your blog you may ask. Well, for one, Blogger has a robot doing its round on the web to identify spamblogs, block them, and after a period of time, delete them. There are many reports of false positives, much to the chagrin of the blog owners. Another reason is to guard against accidental delete (not rare) and hardware failure of the blogging service provider. Your blog may be hacked into one fine day. It is good to protect your hard work by backing up the blog.

Blogger does not have an export or download function. However, Blogger provided some instructions to create a single file with all your posts which you may publish and then copy to your own computer for use as a backup. See How do I create a backup of my entire blog? However, this will involve replacing your current template with a temporary template, saving, republishing and then putting it back again. I do not like this method.

HTTrack Website Copier

Another way to backup your blog is to make a mirror of your blog on your computer. HTTrack Website Copier allows you to download your blog from the Internet to your computer, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images and other files. It also allow you to update an existing mirror. HTTrack Website Copier is a freeware.

Blog Collector

Blog Collector is a nice software to use to backup your blog, particularly if you use the standard Blogger template. If you use non-standard template or you use a extensively modified standard Blogger template, you may have problems and it may only backup the posts in your index page and not the whole blog. There is also a provision to publish your blog as a PDF book. There are 2 versions, Blog Collector and Blog Collector Lite (free) (update: now there are 3 versions - BlogCollector Lite, BlogCollector Standard and BlogCollector Professional. With BlogCollector Professional, you can export your backup file in PDF. WORD or Rich Text and print it in that format.
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Other ways to backup the blog is to have Blogger send email of your posts. Go to SETTINGS > EMAIL and enter your email address in the BLOGSENT ADDRESS box. You can also have emails of the comments sent by going to SETTINGS > COMMENTS and enter your email address in the COMMENT NOTIFICATION ADDRESS box. In this method, you will only backing up the text, not the HTML.

Update 3 October 2007: Sorry to hear about your problem. I have stated that BlogCollector only works well with Blogger standard templates and/or templates that have not been modified extensively. What template are you using?

Anyway I think this post need editing as they still haven't got a way to put what they backup automatically back into your blog although they say they are working on it (if they did, they did not inform me). I think the only way to reliably backup your blog is to edit your post in the HTML mode one by one, copy everything into Notepad files and save them.

I have no time, so I think I will just copy and paste part of my reply into the post to update it.

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