Blogger Backup utility: Create offline backup copy of your Blogspot-hosted blog

Blogger Backup Utility is a nifty tool that I have started using to create and offline backup copies of this blog hosted on Blogspot on to my hard disk. Although I had created a backup earlier the old way, I found it extremely cumbersome to say the least. Using this tool, creating backup of your blog can be achieved with just a few mouse clicks.

The software automatically detects all your blog - just enter your Google username and password and it will retrieve the list of blogs in the account.

(Click on the image to view a larger sized image)

Once done, from the Available blogs section, select the blog whose backup you wish to take. You can even choose to take a backup copy of the comments in the posts. The backup can be saved either as a single file containing all the posts or discrete files for each post made on the blog. Once done, clicking on the Backup posts button will start saving the posts in its specified location. The backups are saved as *.xml files, meaning it is essentially backing up using the the feeds of your blog. You may also perform incremental backup of your blog by choosing to backup only those posts/comments made after a certain date; you can specify the date from when to back up.

The software does not backup any images I may add to the posts. But that is not a problem as such. Any image I use in my blog is automatically uploaded by Blogspot into a Picasa Web album folder [FTP publishing of images to a different host is a different thing and not being considered here]. The whole album folder can be easily downloaded on to your hard disk using Picasa, thus creating a backup of your images too.

The software can also be used to restore any backed up post that you may have deleted from your blog account online. However it still does not allow you to restore comments of the deleted posts.

Please note that for this software to work, you must have feeds for your blog enabled and must set it to full Feed.

Enable Feed for your Blog

To do so, click on the Settings link on your dashboard. Then click on the Site Feed link and select the Full option in the Allow Blog Feeds section.

Thus this software simplifies backing up your Blogspot-hosted blog [like mine] to mere mouse clicks. The software is currently in Beta version and it is expected that future versions will have more features like downloading images, saving posts in PDF format etc

You can also create online backups of your blog by automatically emailing the posts to a email address of your choice. You can use up to 10 email ids for this.

Do let me know if you have any queries, criticisms or suggestions.

Godspeed.