Backing Up Blogger Blogs

Because I post pictures on my blog, and I sometimes use hot links to do so (I think that's the right term), and sometimes those links die, and because anything that is given for free (like Blogger gives me this space) can be easily taken away, I try to backup my blog at least occasionally.

All of the internet browsers I have used have a provision for saving a copy of a web page onto your local hard disk (on Chrome you can find it by clicking the three barred equal sign to the right of the address bar). I started out just saving whatever the default page was, but then I realized you could change the number of posts you wanted on one page, so my new technique was to chang it to an entire month's worth, view my blog, save the page, and then reset the number to the default, which is 7, I believe.

Then I discovered that I could just click on the name of the month in the sidebar and Blogger would display all of the posts from that month. Shoot, that makes it ridiculously easy. Just click on the month, wait for a few seconds for it to load, and then save the page. Repeat for all the months you haven't backed up. (You need to give each file a different name, like month and year, so you don't overwrite your last saved page).

DANGER WILL ROBINSON!

I don't know whether Blogger changed their rules, or their settings, or I just started posting more, but the last time I tried this I got burned. I thought I was getting all of my posts from one particular month, but I only got slightly more than half. To get the other half I had to scroll to the bottom (Ctrl-End) and click on Older Posts. I only figured this out because I could not restore one of the disappeared pictures from my backup because IT WASN'T THERE. Grrr. Stupid Blogger.

I could get around the picture problem by saving the picture to my disk, and then uploading it to Blogger instead of using a hot link, but that takes a few seconds longer, and it means figuring out where to save the picture, and sometimes I just don't want to mess with it. And besides it gives me a good second reason to backup my blog, because the other one is pretty weak. I mean, when has Blogger ever let me down?