I’m not writing at the moment. I am instead doing something I should have done long ago and in fact this should have been part of my ritual from day 1 of writing this blog. As a programmer by trade I should know better yet each night I go to bed and still almost every word I have written in 9 months of blogging remains without back up.
I have written more than 800 posts in that time, tens and tens of thousands of words, hundreds of ideas poured onto the page yet I do so with little regard for protecting it from chance or stupidity. The thought of losing it all now is just bowel churningly awful as I intend to put a load of into into a number of books this year.
When I started my blog I did not really think much beyond signing up to wordpress and then beginning to type. To this day that is mostly what I do with very little plan or real agenda.
I realise that you can export your entire Blog using WordPress functionality, and this I did though I will admit that I think there may well be an issue with the file as I am encountering all manner of issues trying to export it from XML. Instead of buggering around with the file I instead chose to open every single post I have made and copy it to an appropriate word document (one for poems, another for flash fiction etc) and then save that both locally and to the cloud.
I realise there are better more efficient ways of doing this but if 15 years of programming have taught me anything, it is that if you don’t back up regularly you will get your arse spanked on this matter before too long. It will still take me a couple of days to complete but already I feel far happier knowing that I am not leaving such things to chance and I will most certainly be far more disciplined in such matters going forward.
I’m sure you all back everything up though right. Probably just me.
Afterwards 
I have nothing I’ve written in here backed up… Not a single word of it…
I’ve thought about backing it up, but it looked like it’d wind up being incredibly tedious, so I just decided that… Well…I don’t wanna… 🙄
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I’ve gotten lazy about this!! Shame on me! I used to first start my post in a Word document, then after that was saved, copy & paste it into WordPress. I got lazy and just started right at the WordPress Editor. ….sigh. I guess I have work to do!! 🙁 Thanks for the reminder Michael! ❤
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It’s not just you, lol. Thanks for the reminder!
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Ugh. So true.
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Every post I write gets a copy to a doc which goes to a folder, wherein hide all the wp stuff, which gets back up twice a week. The current ‘project’ (story or piece) gets copied every day, sometimes every time I step away from the computer, onto a small flash drive. Just in case. If I hadn’t caught the hard-drive failure in the beginning stages, I would’ve been … crappified (it was bad enough that I didn’t notice Before I uploaded a file that wasn’t what it purported to be, full of errors and not the final copy regardless of the version title), even though I was backing up regularly (which was weekly at the time).
Do it; life is too short to have those days.
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Dang!!! I just lost the last 18 months of my lifes photos when my phone got stolen….shoot!! I need to back up my blog.
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I back up all of my laptop’s files regularly and I also create and save an “export” of my WordPress posts every couple of months. I’m no techie, but I thought that with WordPress, all of our posts, pictures, and comments are stored on WordPress servers and if my laptop crashes or I lose my iPhone, all of my posts are still available somewhere out there on “the cloud.” So I haven’t really thought that much about having to create a copy (in Word or a PDF) of each of my posts, of which there are 886. Am I mistaken?
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Living on the edge indeed !
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Lol sorry to make work for you . better safe than sorry though. 🙂
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Oh good heavens that’s awful now I’m going to have to sort my phone out because I’ve not back that up for such a long time thanks for the reminder
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Well now that is through indeed but absolutely I bet you never have to worry about the nightmare of losing everything
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They are backed up on WordPress yes all I have read situations where people have had corruption issues . I downloaded the file from WordPress but I cannot view it it seems to have a problem which made me think you know what I’ll just get into a better routine just in case. I think it’s very much just a belt and braces kind of thing. Also, the WordPress version is very much a copy of the entire site including all the tags and metadata and all sorts of bits and pieces and whilst it is suitable to reupload as another blog elsewhere it doesn’t make it very easy to pull content from it if you want to use it any other way.
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I turned off my phone automatic syncing, I will never do that again!!
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I get it. Thanks for answering. I just can’t imagine what kind of effort it would take to copy and paste into Word or to create PDFs of close to 900 posts. I think I’ll pass.
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Lol looks like it will take me about 5 hours .
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800 posts in 5 hours? Wow. You’re as fast as greased lightning!
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Fast fingered from a life of coding!
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Never thought to back up my WP writing. I have loads of files on my computer and flash drives but just assumed (and we all know what that does!) that it would always and forever be a part of WP. Maybe I have some work cut out ahead of me. LOTS of copy/paste to do! Ugh! Thanks for the heads up though.
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I’m sure the WordPress backup is absolutely fine but I never had anything on my computer at all. It’s probably worth looking into I may well have overreacted lol
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I do keep a Word document with all my blogs for each quarter. Likewise I keep the photos quarterly. Then archive to a flash drive quarterly. That had been my plan the first 4 1/2 years of writing here. Then I’ve gotten so busy with blog traffic/comments, etc. that the last six months are in here, not archived … how long does it take to get the flash drive, back it up – sigh. I do think sometimes if WordPress had a massive hack, etc. and everything would be gone, so you start over from scratch? Can you backdate the posts? I’m not going there. What I will do is get the *&^% flashdrive now. 🙂
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In some ways it might be nice if everything was gone could you imagine just starting again
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Can you imagine? I know you can import material from one blog platform to another, but I wonder if the dates come out correctly? And I also blog at a hyperlocal paper (Patch.com) and I have finished my post in Word and transferred it to WordPress and then tweaked a few words here or there and when I try to cut-and-paste it into my other post, it comes out strange with the formatting and line spacing for some reason. Hope you did not encounter any problems.
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Wish I’d have found this information a bit sooner…maybe you’ve already found it yourself…anywho…
http://www.blogbooker.com will take your xml export and turn it into PDF or Word files…
Just tried it out on my own site…looks like it works well…at least at a glance…
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Cheers man. Alas my wp xml has some issues . nearly copied em all over though. Has been fun seeing all the things ive written 🙂 id forgotten so much
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No all good its been nice rereading lots of what i wrote too 🙂
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Thanks Indeedy 🙂
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oh my, that would be quite a chore! glad you didn’t lose it all
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It cetysinly was but least i have it all Backed up So i sleep more soundly 🙂
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Lazy with just library to computers but… I did recently start copies again for some posts….
Got flash drive lazy all four drives I m bad bout that
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I think it’s important to be careful because of just how horribly wrong it can go . when I copied everything back out I realised just how much I had written over the course of a year and how gutted I would have been had I lost it all and I was surprised I felt so attached to it
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Too true…. Even a hobby can turn into something pretty involved. I know better…. I sure don’t count on phone or tablet for have pix in cloud….things have changed hugely since my 1995 computer courses!!!!
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Ooh windows 95! Nice
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Actually tech classes had DOS also those were the days……nice chat will ck more next trip out.
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