Above the Fold

Our recent being-hacked experience was a close call. Fortunately, the fool who crashed our party mostly just overwrote some simple text pages that were easily restored by republishing your blogs. However, this made me think that everyone on the server ought to know how to back up their blog posts.

All of your entries are stored in a database, and Movable Type offers a simple way to create a single text file containing all the posts along with all their metadata (titles, dates) and related content, such as comments and trackback pings.

Every now and then I back up the entire database but you should think about making a backup of your own blog from time to time. How do you decide how often to do it? Well, anything not backed up, in case of disaster, would have to be recreated by patching together information from Google cache and the Wayback machine.

Anyway, here’s how to back up your blog:

1. Go to your blog on the Mediajunkie server
2. Choose Import / Export in the side navigation (under Utilities)
3. Choose the Export “tab”
4. Right-click (on Windows) or Ctrl-click (on the Mac) on the link labeled with your blog’s name, and
5. On the menu that pops up, choose “Download Linked File” or “Save Link As” or whatever your browser calls the command for downloading a linked resource.
6. You’ll be prompted by a Save dialog box. Give the file a name ending in .txt and save it somewhere where’ll expect to find it later.
7. Just wait for the file to download.

In the future, if you need to restore your blog, you can use the Import service to upload this same file and repopulate your post-apocalyptic blog. But let’s hope it never comes to that.