How to backup your entire WordPress or Blogger/Blogspot blog

We all know how many hours go into creating the “perfect” blog. We also know how annoying and frustrating it can be when something crashes, fails to save or gets deleted.

Imagine if one day poof your blog was gone – hacked, deleted or corrupted!

It is so important to backup your blog on a regular basis and I always advise to backup your theme before editing code so that you have something to fall back on.

Todays tutorial is a very simple one but hopefully it will remind you to create a backup right now incase anything ever goes wrong.

How to backup your self-hosted WordPress blog

1. Backup your design, theme & blog

You can backup your WordPress blog through FTP, your web host or by using a plugin such as BackupBuddy, Updraftplus or WordPress Backup to Dropbox.

The most important thing is to make sure you are also downloading a backup of your database. And don’t rely on your web host creating backups, it’s always better to have a copy. for yourself.

2. Backup your posts

Login to your account, go to Tools and Export. Export an XML file of your posts, categories and comments. Choose what you want to backup – download together or separately.

How to backup your Blogger blog

1. Backup your blog theme

Login to your Blogger account. Go to the theme tab. In the corner beside the settings (gear icon) you will see a button “backup/restore”. Click it and “Download Full Template”. I like to rename it something like “xomisse-design-aug2013.xml” so I know what it is.

2. Backup your posts

Login to your account, go to Settings > Other and the first section you’ll see Blog Tools. Under this click Export Blog > Download Blog. Save the .xml file where you’ll be able to find it.

3. Backup your images on blogger

While logged into your account, go to Picasa Web Albums and Google+, here you will find images uploaded onto Blogger. Head over to Google Takeout and login using your Google/Blogger account. Select the service “Picasa Web Albums” and create archive. When the archive is created, click download. I’d also suggest doing this for Google+ Photos. You could also go to your Google+ profile, hover over “Home” on the left and go down to settings. Then on the left you’ll see an arrow next to Account, click that and Download your Data will appear in a list. You can download your Picasa Web Albums this way too.

4. Backup entire Blogger account & multiple blogs using Google Takeout

Head over to Google Takeout and login using your Google/Blogger account. Select the service “Blogger” and create archive. When everything is ready, click download.

What to do when you backup files

I like to backup my backups, what can I say I’m a Digital Media graduate and learned pretty quickly that “the assignment is on my laptop but it and my hard-drive broke” is the new “my dog ate my homework” excuse.

I use Dropbox to backup everything and send files between my phone, computer, laptop and college computer. The benefit of using Dropbox to host your backup files is that it is accessible anywhere so you can restore your blog at any time.

Do you keep a backup of your files? How often do you backup your blog?

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20 responses to “How to backup your entire WordPress or Blogger/Blogspot blog”

  1. I just backed up my blog with your advice! Thank you very much 🙂 I’ve been worried about losing all my hard work for a while. Now I don’t have to think about it!

  2. I’ve never backed it up! I’d be gutted to lose 3 years worth of work, going to do it now. Thank you!

  3. Hey I’m a new follower from Twitter. This is such an important post and I hope more bloggers take this advise and backup their work.
    This is coming from someone who was in a pool of tears after Blogger ‘accidently’ deleted years of posts and images, connections and links causing my whole blog to be de-indexed and disappear.

    …guess who hadn’t backed up her work?

    Even though Blogger have an appeal option and they even said that my blog may have been caught up in the net with some spam blogs, 7 months on it’s still dead and I had to start from scratch. That was painful.

    1. Awh no!!! That’s awful, I’ve actually heard this happen to a few people. Hopefully people will read your comment and realise that they need to backup their work regularly.

  4. Mac

    Great guide. Loved your advice to backup my blog in dropbox. Thanks alot.

  5. Robin Wilson

    Thank you so much! I have been worrying about this though my blog just went live. Thanks so to you I just installed the plug-in (and DropBox) and did my first back up! What a relief. So glad I found you!

    1. Happy to help! It’s so important to backup and it’s great that you’ve set it up straight away

  6. Hey there–i am trying to back up all my photos from my blog…Once I get to google takeout, there is not option for select picasa web albums…? It gives me an option for everything else, but Picasa..Why is that?Thanks

    1. Hello, Picasa Web Albums in now Google+ Photos 🙂

  7. Very interesting information. I am blogging more than a year, but I never backup my work. Yesterday first time I did this good work and then started to read more about it to have more knowledge.

    I have question, like I took backup for my blogs, then what should I do?

    1. I’m not sure what you mean – once you backup your blog you don’t need to do anything else unless you have reason to.

  8. useful tutorial and thank you so much!

  9. If you select the “backup entire blogger account” option, will you not have to back up the photos, template, etc. separately? And do you have a post about how to restore everything? If you make changes to a template after you’ve already backed it up, will it update automatically?

    Sorry for the many questions!

    1. Hello! Yes you’ll still have to download your template separately but you can select Google Photos as well as Blogger from the Google Takeout to download images as well as blog data. Here is a post about restoring your blog – http://xomisse.com/blog/restore-your-blogger-blog/

  10. Thanks for this. I have my own backup method (images hosted on imgur and hard drive and box/posts saved to my Dropbox, Google Drive and on paper) but I was wondering, with this backup, how would I restore it?

    Love the blog! ;D

    1. Hello, if you’re manually saving each image and each blog post content then you would have to manually restore them. Backing up images, posts and the template using the tools above means you can easily import them again, there’s a tutorial here.

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