http://bloggerbackup.codeplex.com/
If you run a Blogger.com blog (like CFJ – come on, it’s a freeware site!), then you might be interested in this app.
If you weren’t aware, CFJ and countless other blogger.com blogs were affected recently by either an errant automated spam-blog autodetection script on Google’s side, or by the fallout caused by the Gawker account compromise. Blogs affected is an understatement, they were deleted.
After a day of doing some research on the Google forums, and posting questions, the blogs were restored less than 24 hours after they were deleted – but this brought up a good point: Even the mighty Google can wreak havoc upon it’s users in more ways than just a gmail outage.
In that I had no access to the blog, I decided (obviously I should have done this way earlier) to find a tool that could back it up for emergencies later.
The Blogger Backup Utility (available at CodePlex) is a handy utility that can backup your entire blog and save it locally to your hard drive in the form of xml files.
Connecting to your Blogger account is simple, just click the drop-down menu by ‘Available Blogs’ and then ‘add…’ and it will ask you for your Google credentials to access the listing of blogs available under your account.
Using the automatic method of logging into Blogger, I can see all the blogs that belong to me.
Clicking ‘OK’ will bring you the backup window, where you can click that drop-down selection again and pick the blog to back up.
You can adjust some parameters such as where to save the files, whether or not you want to back up a date range, grab the comments, etc.
One major “gotcha”
One thing I would like to see here is a way to grab the images as well and store them in a subfolder off of the main blog backup directory.
Since we are talking about Blogger.com blogs, by default, the images for a blogger.com account are stored in a Picasa web album. There are utilities that exist that can download these web albums in full, or you can simply go to the web album online and download it from there. So, in a way, you can overcome a couple issues…but then, if you happen to restore your files, you may need to manually repair the image links – that doesn’t sound like fun.
Save your settings
You can save your settings for a future backup session if need be – one thing I noticed here was that if you have created a backup session but haven’t saved it yet…then click ‘save as’, you will get an error about using an empty path. Simply clicking ‘save settings’ first mitigates this.
A nice feature to add might be a set of command-line parameters which could allow me to reference a settings file for a scheduled task.
Restore!
A good backup program isn’t good unless it has a restore function – and this one does. But, it is limited to Google’s “50 posts per day” limit. So, this is no fault to the program. This process is just as quick as it is to backup, but I didn’t see a way to restore posts to a different blog.
Summary
Overall, this program is handy in cases of emergencies, but could use a couple additional features to push it to be something extraordinary.
The image backup thing could be a big deal if they were linked to Picasweb and the album got removed somehow. Restoring these links would be tedious.
Likes:
- Easy to use, finds all associated blogs automatically
- Decent featureset
- Ability to save settings
- Ability to restore posts
Concerns:
- Bug when clicking ‘Save Settings As’ before clicking ‘Save Settings’ – minor
- Need a way to restore posts to a different blog – minor
- No way to schedule backups – medium
- No image backup – major
- No development activity since 2008 – major
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