The only unchangeable fact about life is that everyone can be sure of is that life is uncertain.
Changes can throw your way of living into topsy-turvy.
That goes for anything and everything including your Blogspot blog. You may spend hundreds of hours writing, editing and publishing great content.
But life happens. Your blog might get deleted. Someone might hack into your Google account and delete all your blog posts- your hard work.
It’s always better to take a backup and be safe in the knowledge that an offline copy exists that can be uploaded to take things back to the same place.
The heart of my discontent lies in the fact that most bloggers don’t heed to these warnings.
You can easily take complete backup of your blogspot blog in a few simple steps.
Here are the steps:
All steps are backed up with screenshots to help you understand each single step.
What should you back up on a Blogspot blog in the first place?
- Content on your blog: This refers to the entire html that makes for all your pages and posts
- The template. The template is basically the code that makes your blog appear as it is. If your blog looks and feels certain that is thanks to the template customizations.
- Images. When you back up your entire content, your images too should come along. But that doesn’t happen. Because when blog on Blogspot and upload images, these images are not loaded to Blogspot but to Google photos called Picasso earlier. If you want to keep of those I will discuss a way to get hold of those.
- HTML gadgets These are what Blogspot uses to typically make the blog do functions that are not coded into its template. They are separate from the template and don’t get backed up with content. There’s an option to get the html code of these gadgets as well.
Let’s get started. Go to Settings on the left hand side. And then click on Other.
You will that below Layout and Themes.
On clicking you will find an option that says Backup your content.
Once done you will get a pop up asking you to save the file to your computer.
Here’s an image:
When you do so it will automatically download an xml file containing your blog posts and comments from visitors.
This option lets you back up content from blogs one at a time. And you will have to repeat this many times if you have several blogs. But if you have only one blog this option is golden.
Backing up your theme
Backing up your theme is quite simple.
Go to dashboard and on the right side you will find an option that says theme.
Click on that.
On the top right hand side you will find an option that says Backup/Restore.
Click on that.
You will get an option to download the theme. Even at this stage Blogger gives a nudge informing you that some gadgets may not be backed up.
How to backup gadgets?
For backing up gadgets go to layout and click on the edit button for each gadget and copy the code into a notepad file. Do this for all gadgets you want to save.
How to backup images on Blogspot?
Google doesn’t give a straightforward to backup your images. If you want another copy of your images there’s only one way to do that.
It’s by using Google Takeout.
Google Takeout keeps a file of all your data associated with Google including Blogs and blog images as saved on Google photos. Do remember that if there are guest authors they will have to login to Takeout themselves and give a copy of their images.
Go to this link: https://takeout.google.com/
You can see a list of the data that Google has on you. A big list of 49 services in total.
Click the button that says Select None since by default all options are selected.
Now scroll to Blogger and Google Photos and click to pull the slider up.
Click on Next.
You will get an option to choose the archive format as in zip or other. And the attachment size starting from 2GB to 50GB.
There’s no option to cherry pick certain blogs and all your blogs will be downloaded to the zip archive.
Here’s what the zip file looks like for blogs.
So that’s how you backup your Blogspot blog fully. If you’ve doubts do let me know.
FAQ
Can the backed up xml file be used on WordPress?
The xml file doesn’t work on wordpress. That’s why I suggest using the import from Blogger functionality built-in WordPress if you want to export a blogspot blog.
What are the benefits of exporting?
It’s possible that Google deletes your blog for policy violations. In that case an offline copy can be used to publish the content on a self-hosted blog.
