July 2, 2007

Tool for Backing Up a Blogger Blog

Blogger Backup is a small open-source Windows tool that, well, backups the posts and comments from a Blogger blog. You'll have to enter your Google credentials (and your only protection is that the software is open source and you can check the code), select the blog you want to backup and decide how many posts you want to save.

The format for exporting is Atom, so for each post you'll get two files: one for the actual content of the post and one for the comments. There's also the option to save all the posts in a big Atom file.

Once you have all these files on your computer, you could write a tool that imports them to a database or use Blogger's API to recreate the blog. In fact, this tool also uses Blogger's API to get the feeds.


Another way to backup your blog involves manually downloading a page that contains all your blog posts and using an extension to get the photos from these posts.

{ via Digital Inspiration }
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8 comments:

  1. James E. Robinson, IIIJuly 2, 2007 at 5:37 PM

    #!/bin/sh
    # backup script for new blogger
    URL=http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?max-results=100
    for x in 1 101 201 301 401; do
    curl -m 300 -s "$URL&start-index=$x" > $1-$x-atom
    gzip $1-$x-atom
    sleep 10
    done

    # i have fewer than 500 posts at the moment...

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousJuly 2, 2007 at 6:29 PM

    Unfortunately restores don't work so smoothly. Blogger's API will lock you out after the 50th or so post in a day. Visiting the GUI shows that new posts require a CAPCHA.

    I haven't figured a way around it, but I'm still looking it it (haven't talked to Blogger about it yet).

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousJuly 2, 2007 at 6:30 PM

    I might add, that unless your program is checking your blog's ATOM feed after every post, there is no way to tell if your API post has triggered the CAPCHA or not.

    ReplyDelete
  4. GregJuly 2, 2007 at 7:28 PM

    I hear you about your concerns on the UserId/Password. That would freak me out a little too...

    That's why I purposely DO NOT save the Blogger password and really only use them to provide a user a list of their blogs.

    It can be a pain entering the password every time, but I feel it was a much safer approach...

    That's also another reason I released the source... That way anyone can grab it and confirm I'm not doing anything "bad" with their credentials.

    Anyway, thanks for the plug for my little utility... :)

    Take care,
    Greg

    ReplyDelete
  5. AnonymousJuly 2, 2007 at 10:54 PM

    If you feel uncomfortable about entering your password for backing up, change it to something stupid just before you use it and after backing up, change it back to your original or a new password. That way, exposure is minimized.

    ReplyDelete
  6. JeanneOctober 26, 2008 at 11:46 PM

    What if you're a Mac user who doesn't do Windows?

    ReplyDelete
  7. AnonymousMay 12, 2009 at 12:59 PM

    I have written one simple java code to backup blog.

    http://binodjava.blogspot.com/2009/05/how-to-backup-of-your-blogger-blog.html

    Thanks,

    Binod Suman
    http://binodsuman.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete
  8. AnonymousJanuary 28, 2011 at 5:31 AM

    The Import & Export feature in Blogger is now live and can be accessed from the Settings tab of your Blogger dashboard.

    ReplyDelete

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