Backup Your Online Content!
Inspired by the hacking of Amal Mattu et. al’s fantastic FOAM and Emergency Medicine pearl website, UMEM.org, I thought I’d quickly review some easy ways to backup your online content, from blogs to Twitter and Facebook.
Quick Guidelines to Backing Up
You can never have enough backups (you need at least two).
It’s best if you can automate some of the process, so you’ll keep your backups current.
The approach I’m going to suggest here either involves two backups: either:
an external hard drive (I love my Western Digital My Passport drive, works great for Macs and PCs, 1 terabyte will cost you less than $100)
and/or Dropbox. Dropbox is great. I’ll show you how to make it automatically sync a folder on your hard drive, so you don’t even have to think twice. If you don’t have Dropbox, sign up for a free 5GB account, disclosure, I get some extra free space, too.
How to Backup Different Online Services
Really easy. Go to your Account Settings page, scroll to the bottom, and click the “Request your archive” button:
They’ll email you when your archive is ready to download. Then save the archive to your hard drive, and either your external hard drive and/or your Dropbox account.
Really easy as well. Go to your General Account Settings page and click “Download a copy” of your Facebook data:
Then save the archive to your hard drive, and either your external hard drive and/or your Dropbox account.
A quick word: please realize that with blogs, the template (which includes the style, design, images, etc) is separate from the content. If you don’t back up both, you’ll lose both. Finally, if you include images in your posts, those typically stored in an “image uploads” directory. Don’t forget those, too! Also: blog content will typically be given to you as one big file (“Exported”), which contains all your posts and comments. You can then use this file to “Restore” your blog, or even transfer the content to another blogging service (“Importing your blog”).
Template: Follow this Tutorial. Content: Follow this tutorial, under “Export blog.”
Content: Follow this tutorial under “Export.” Links: If you use the Links or Blogroll feature, follow this tutorial. Template/Theme: You can’t really do this on Wordpress.com, but the site maintains a ton of backups.
If you host your own Wordpress blog, there are a number of great plugins that will help automate the backup process for you. One that I use for theNNT is called Online Backup for Wordpress (there are a number of others that do the same thing). Namely, these plugins with automatically email you (or store online in the cloud) a full backup of your site for you at whatever frequency you want.
To install it, go to your Plugins → Add New menu, and search for “Online Backup”:
Then once installed, under Tools → Online Backup, you can set whatever options you want:
Set a scheduled backup (once a day, once a week, once a month)
Determine if you want to backup your content, your templates (themes), or both
Determine if you want to email the backup to yourself or store it in the cloud somewhere
The easiest way to backup is just copy a file from your own hard drive to an external hard drive. That’s it, done.
You can also do a sexier, incremental backup, but it takes some setup. (Incremental backup means the backup copy won’t re-copy every single file, which could take a long time, but will only update files that have changed; it will also store copies of the files at different times, so you can go back to a previous, saved version if you want.) I’m a Mac user, so I’m most familiar with Time Machine. In Windows 8, you can use the File History Backup option.
And then there’s Dropbox. Here’s why I think it’s the best tool:
Dropbox lives on your computer and in the cloud. Every file that you change, move, or add to your computer’s own Dropbox folder gets automatically uploaded to Dropbox’s servers as an online backup, and then also gets updated on every computer you’ve installed your Dropbox account to. Imagine you have a home computer and a work laptop. If you’re editing a file or updating a file at home, copy it (or just store it) in your Dropbox folder, and when you turn on your computer at work, Dropbox will download the most recent version to your work computer. No more emailing files to yourself!
Three other great features:
You can email a link of a file to anyone, and they can download it from your Dropbox account.
Dropbox also supports versioning or incremental backups. Let me show you. Here’s a file I’ve been working on. I recently updated it, but I realized I had a nice table in the original version that is long since deleted, and I can’t get it back. I can revert to the original document and get that table back:
You can have Dropbox sync folders outside of your computer’s Dropbox folder! This gets a bit technical, but it’s really useful. For example, I sync all my important documents – presentations, web design, my CV, manuscripts I’m working on – with Dropbox, but I don’t store everything in my Dropbox folder. I create “symlinks” to the Dropbox folder. Lifehacker can explain more.
There are many other great backup solutions similar to Dropbox out there, but I’ll admit, Dropbox is certainly my favorite.
Now: don’t just stand there. Backup something!
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