Backing Up Social Networks, Part 2: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 03-28-08

Last week I talked about backups for two different Web 2.0 services: del.icio.us and LinkedIn. I chose those two because they're the ones I use the most often.

This week I'm going to start by talking about Flickr, a popular photo-sharing service that doubles as a social network. I don't post photos to Flickr myself, but the Ur-Guru does. (Yes, lots of them are pictures of me. What did you expect?)

I first noticed the existence of Flickr backup tools a couple of years ago. I had a bit of trouble understanding why you would need them. After all, the photos can't get to Flickr unless you first have them on your computer (or a camera connected to the Internet). Surely if they're worth sharing with the world, you're going to save them on your hard drive or a CD, and they'll get backed up with the rest of your data.

On the other hand, if something happened and you needed to re-upload your photos, remembering which ones you'd had there and which tags you'd used to identify each image could get to be a real challenge. That's why there are programs like Flickredit, a Java-based program for editing, tagging, uploading, and backing up your photos and their associated metadata (copyright info, title, description, tags). If you've put hours into creating this metadata for your Flickr photos, I'd recommend checking it out.

Photobucket, another popular photo-sharing site, lets its pro users back up via FTP download. Regular users can order backup CDs or DVDs from the Photobucket Store.

Enough people who belong to multiple social networking sites have expressed a desire to import their profiles without typing everything over again that there's now a Data Portability Project. There's a long list of the benefits of data portability over on the Use Cases page. They look particularly useful for people who use a lot of job-search or social networking sites.

Interestingly, however, while the list mentions transferring, aggregating, and exporting contacts and other data, it doesn't specifically address backup. If your data is that portable, however, it should be possible to port it onto your hard drive and back it up. And, of course, having the same information duplicated across several sites can also act as a backup, though if you delete something by accident, the deletion might propagate across all the sites. Which leads me to wonder whether there's an “Undo Portability Project” in the making. (Repeat after me: synchronization is not backup.)

It will take a while before the Data Portability Project produces useful results, so remember to check out the possibilities for backing up your profile information and other data before you sign up. If you need to keep your profile info in a Word doc in order to keep from having to re-type it, then that's probably what you should do. And if you can get new messages, photos, and the like from your friends as an RSS feed, remember to subscribe to your own feed in order to keep a copy.

In most cases, anything you post on these sites goes up there at your own risk, and it may well become the property of the social networking site once you put it there.

If you're an avid user of MySpace, Facebook, or other social networks, why not share your method for backing up your profile and other data—or your reason for not bothering.

Technorati Tags: social networks,MySpace,Facebook,Flickr,Photobucket,data portability

More Blogger Backup Tips

The Google Operating System blog posted some tips about backing up Blogspot blogs which use the new (no longer beta) Blogger. While they're not of much use to me for this blog, which I publish by FTP, they might help some readers out there.

WordPress Backups, circa 2007: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 01-26-07

This week we’re moving from Blogger backups to WordPress backups. I have two WordPress blogs, though I don’t post very regularly to them. (I really should do something about that, but those pesky clients keep interfering.) I love WordPress. It’s less user-friendly than Blogger, but it also does endless things Blogger doesn’t. The Ur-Guru even trained it to provide dynamic content for his new personal website.

Unlike Blogger, WordPress stores all your blog entries in an SQL database. In the old days of WordPress 1.whatever, that meant backing up via something like PHPMyAdmin, through my web host’s control panel. It was pretty geeky, but at least it was possible, and I talked about it in my “Backups for the WordPress-Obsessed” article on October 7, 2005.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, a clever fellow named Scott Merrill had created a WordPress Database Backup plugin to save people like me from having to cope with PHPMyAdmin. That plugin now comes bundled with WordPress 2.0.whatever. If your web host hasn’t upgraded to WordPress 2.0 yet—shame on them! Seriously, you should download the plugin and install it yourself. (That means you copy the file(s) into the wp-content/plugins directory.)

Once you’re sure you have the WordPress Database Backup plugin installed, login to your blog dashboard, select the “Plugins” tab, and activate the backup plugin. Then click the “Manage” tab. Voila! A “Backup” tab appears on the sub-menu. This shows you just what gets saved in your backup, which is pretty much everything. You can elect to add things like your PodPress download statistics to the backup.

There’s a very funny step-by-step Flash video tutorial showing you how to do this at Tubetorial.

Even better, you can automate your WordPress backups by using another of Scott Merrill’s plugins, WP-Cron. “Cron” is short for “crontab,” a Unix (and now Linux) command for executing programs at set intervals. (The name derives from Greek *chronos*, meaning “time.”) You can get the plugin at Skippy.Net.

If you install the WP-Cron plugin, the Backup management tab will give you the option to back up your database automatically every day and e-mail it to you. I learned about this from Tip Vista and started doing it immediately.

Remember to send the backup file to an account which is not hosted on the same server as the blog! The database for my Authorized Articles blog is only about 150K, so it’s a manageable attachment. If you have a large blog, you’ll want to send the backup to an account that handles large attachments, like Gmail.

For those on the cutting edge, WordPress 2.1 has just been released. (I know because the Ur-Guru just installed it for himself.) It no longer comes bundled with the WordPress Database Backup plugin, though it has a built-in cron function. You can download the newest version of the WP backup plugin from Il Filosofo. (Scott Merrill is no longer developing it, having moved on to bigger and better things.)

I have to admit that it looks like I’d still need to go in to PHPMyAdmin in order to restore my WordPress database if I lost it, but that doesn’t leave me any worse off than I was with WordPress 1.5.

Now, I know I have some TypePad users among my readers, and if one of them would like to write a guest column about backing up TypePad blogs, it would be welcome.

Please feel free to send me suggestions for future articles.

Blogger Backup: The FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 01-19-07

We return at last to our regularly scheduled program: the series of articles about backing up your website(s).

These days, even people who don’t have regular websites have blogs. (My e-zine readers may be the exception.) One reason for this is that you can set up a blog in five minutes, for free, at Blogger.com. And that’s exactly what I did when I realized that a blog would be the perfect way to put the back issues of this e-zine online.

In some ways, I might have done better to wait. Blogger is very easy to use, but it has some limitations. The new Blogger Beta adds a number of functions, but also a number of hassles. I’ve had trouble publishing for the last two weeks, getting no end of FTP errors with no apparent cause. (This may have something to do with the fact that the new Blogger is designed to work best for people who use the Blogspot hosting service.)

Things seem to be working again, and I’ve managed to give the blog a facelift and some added usability, but the hassle definitely brought home to me the importance of backing up my blog.

Most of the posts on the FileSlinger™ Backup Blog are “reprints” of my e-zine, and I compose them in Microsoft Word. So I have both my original Word doc and the e-mail version sent out to the list as backups, and those get backed up with everything else on my drive. I could possibly survive without a backup of the blog per se.

The idea behind blogs, however, is to write spontaneously and directly into the blog, whenever you discover or think of something worth blogging about. That means that most users of Blogger don’t have any other copies of their blog posts.

For reasons unknown to me, Blogger does not provide any kind of export function (unlike the vastly superior WordPress, which I use for my Author-ized Articles blog, and to which I will almost certainly switch the Backup Blog as soon as I have time). I’d hoped that along with its other new functions, the new Blogger Beta would include backup, but not so.

Blogger Help does provide instructions on how to back up your entire blog, but their solution is kind of strange. To make a backup, you have to replace your template (the thing that tells the system what the blog looks like) with the code they provide. This results in publishing your entire blog on a single page. (There are more than 200 posts on my blog, most of them upwards of 800 words in length. That’s a very long page. And I’m not a prolific blogger.) To make a backup, you then save the web page from your browser.

My response when I saw this was “You’ve got to be joking.”

Because I do publish my blog by FTP to my own web server, all the archive files are actually up there anyway, handily divided into different folders by year and by month, with an individual page for each posting. I can just copy those files, along with the rest of my website, onto my local disk, and have them backed up with everything else. They also get included in any web backups I make from the control panel.

For those using the Blogspot hosting option, though (which seems to be most Blogger users), that’s not an option. Hence the rather crude workaround that the Blogger team recommends.

A few enterprising souls have created products designed to make it easier to back up your blog. CodePlex Blogger Backup is an alpha release, which means you have to expect bugs and other problems. I got an unhandled exception error the first time, but after that it worked just fine, and saved the posts as individual XML files in a folder, very quickly.

Lab Asprise’s Blog Collector is another option. It works with MSN, Blogspot, and other blogs. The only problem is that the Blogger Beta puts out a very strange, completely invalid RSS feed (or it does for my blog, anyway), and a valid Atom feed. Neither appeared to work, but then, my WordPress blog didn’t either. I’m not sure what’s up with that. The Lite version is free, so you can try it, but for obvious reasons I can’t recommend it myself.

Lifehacker recommended using a site copier like HTTrack (Windows) or WebGrabber (Mac) to back up a Blogger blog. Both the CodePlex and the Asprise products are Windows only, so if you’re a Mac user, that may be your only alternative to the one-page backup option suggested by Blogger Help.

And if you don’t have a blog yet, but are thinking of starting one, my advice is to avoid Blogger and go with WordPress—and not just because it’s easier to back up.

Back Up Your Website, Part 2: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 12-22-06

Last week we discussed two ways to back up your website, both of which assume that you have direct access to your web hosting account. This is your website and your domain, so even if you outsource the design and maintenance, you should keep the login and password on file.

Today’s Backup Reminder is aimed at the slightly less geeky and those who don’t edit their own sites. Next week I hope to be able to provide some specifics on backing up database-driven websites and those created with content management software like Mambo. (My Mambo expert colleague is looking into the details of this.) For now we’ll concentrate on how to back up your site even if you leave all the confusing stuff about hosts, servers, and control panels to someone else.

The key to backing up your website (or indeed someone else’s) if you can’t log in an download it through FTP or a website editor like Dreamweaver is getting an offline browser utility. Offline browsers date back to the days before widespread broadband access. These days it’s possible to be online almost anywhere. You can find free wireless in most major cities of the US. (In fact, a new café with free wireless access opened just down the street from me, and El Cerrito is not a major city.)

Ten years ago it was a different story. Browsing websites was a slow and often expensive proposition, with either the ISP or the telephone company charging by the minute for access to the Web. (Yes, Europeans have to pay by the minute for all phone calls, as I discovered when living in England in the mid-Nineties.) So there was a good reason to develop tools like this.

Fortunately for those who need to make copies of websites and don’t want to sit there saving each individual page from their browsers (which doesn’t really make an accurate copy of the site anyway), offline browsing utilities still exist. I use WinHTTrack, which I discovered a few years ago. (The name comes from the http protocol used by web browsers.) The most recent version dates from September of 2006, so it’s keeping up with the times. Just give it a URL and it will copy the entire site to your hard drive, preserving the folder structure. It’s free, and you can download it from http://www.httrack.com.

For the Mac user, there’s the colorfully and aptly named SiteSucker, available at http://www.sitesucker.us. Not having a Mac, I can’t test it out, but it appears to work the same way as HTTrack: feed it a URL and it sucks the web pages down to your hard drive. It promises to work on both PowerPC and Intel-based Macs, but you need OS X Tiger or newer. (If you have an older Mac, dig around a bit on the shareware sites and you’ll probably find something that works.)

These two free programs mean there’s no excuse not to make a backup of your website. Of course, if the website changes, you have to update your copy.

This isn’t an ideal backup method, but it’s a lot better than nothing. If you’re not sure what your web designer is doing about backing up your site, it’s a good idea to give yourself some insurance.

Don’t forget to back up before you plunge into the holidays!

Back Up Your Website: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 12-15-06

A few weeks ago, one of my Faithful Readers wrote to say:

I'm pretty rigorous about backing up, but I just discovered that our web pages don't get backed up. We accidentally deleted several pages while editing our website, so I asked the question, ‘How is our website backed up?’ The answer: ‘Duh-h-h-h, don't know.’ Our web hosts informed us they don't back up our pages. So we're having to reconstruct them from original Word docs.

Ouch!

When last I checked, he still hadn’t found a backup system for his website. And if one person has this problem, there are guaranteed to be others, so a newsletter about backing up websites seemed timely.

The easiest way to make sure your website gets backed up is to create and edit your website offline. Programs like Dreamweaver ask you to set up a local directory for your website files. Change the files there, then upload them. Then make sure that the local directory gets backed up along with your other business data.

If you don’t maintain your own website, be sure to ask your web designer to do this. (Chances are pretty good that s/he updates your site offline, but only about 50-50 that s/he backs up.) Any time there’s a major overhaul to the site, get a copy of the files on CD.

There are also other ways to back up your site. If you have control panel access to your web hosting account (and you certainly should; check the original messages you got from your hosting company for details), you should be able to back up your entire home directory in a few easy steps. My current web host, iPowerWeb, uses the vDeck control panel; my previous web host used Plesk. Both are pretty straightforward. You log in at a special URL (usually something like “www.yourdomain.com/cpanel”) and get a choice of things to administer, usually accompanied by colorful icons.

In my case, I click “Host Administration” and then “Backups.” After that all I have to do is enter my e-mail address and click the button labeled “backup.” This results in the message: “Your backup request has been queued. When the backup completes, you will be notified at sallie@fileslinger.com.”

And, sure enough, I get notified. Then I need to download that file onto the drive I want to back it up to, so I fire up my FTP program.

This is a big file (428 MB), because it not only includes my two websites (which have a fair number of audio and some video files on them, as well as a collection of PDFs) but also my FTP server, mail server, assorted configuration files, and three blogs.

To restore the site from one of these backups, I just have to tell the control panel where to find the file.

I’m being summoned for a conference call, so I’ll return next week with more ways to back up your website. Meanwhile, if you’re not sure how or whether your website is backed up, go and find out!

Back Up Your TypePad Blog

Neville Hobson (of "For Immediate Release" fame) has just posted a reminder to TypePad users to back up their blogs in preparation for some server maintenance Six Apart is performing.

Neville's post includes directions and a few extra tips about the backup process.

The truth is that it's always a good time to back up your blog, no matter what platform or host you use.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 10-07-05: Backup for the WordPress-Obsessed

I’ve got blogs on the brain this week. Yesterday Steven Van Yoder interviewed me for his Get Slightly Famous study about blogs as a tool to grow your business and bring traffic to your website, so I got to tell him about the genesis of the FileSlinger™ Backup Blog. (I’ll post the MP3 file on the blog.)

Not only that, I was setting up a new blog site for a client until late last night and had plenty of opportunity to think about backups and blogs in more than one context.

When I first wrote about backing up your blog on February 12^th, the Backup Blog was barely a month old, but I’d posted all the back issues of the e-zine there and the archives therefore date back to 2003. After the time I spent on re-posting them, I didn’t want to lose them.

I created the Backup Blog using Blogger, the free blogging tool owned by Google. (Five minutes to set up the blog and five hours to customize the template so it looks like the rest of my website.) Blogger gives you two options: they’ll host your blog on blogspot.com, or you can host it yourself. I chose to host it myself, being the sort of person who likes to keep control of my own data.

What that looks like is a directory on the fileslinger.com web server called “blog” with subdirectories for each year, and each month within the year (for example, public_html/blog/2003/07/), with each post as a separate html file. To back up the blog, I download those folders using Dreamweaver or FTP. Then they get copied to my external drive along with the rest of my “Slinger Docs” when Karen’s Replicator runs at startup. That means I have three copies of the blog files.

As “flat” HTML files, they don’t take up much room, even though there are a lot of them: the entire blog folder is only 5 MB, and that includes the PDF file of the San Francisco Chronicle article about small-business blogging.

If I go into my vDeck Host Manager and make a backup of everything I have on fileslinger.com, that also backs up my blog. This backup function creates a single backup file containing my web, ftp, and e-mail directories, and I can download that and store it elsewhere.

My two other blogs, FileSlinger™ Favorites and Author-izer™ Articles, are WordPress blogs and I both host and manage them on my website. WordPress has several features which Blogger doesn't, such as categorized posts, static pages, and trackbacks. (Contrary to some people's beliefs, you can create permalinks with Blogger, but only if you turn on the "separate pages" option in your archive settings.)

This "state of the art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics" (to quote its home page) does not store blog posts as HTML files in folders: it keeps them in SQL databases. What that means is that even though I can log in to WordPress and see a list of my posts, edit them, or delete them, they don’t live in the same folder as WordPress itself. If I download the index.php file for either the Favorites blog or the Articles blog, I don’t see anything remotely like what you find when I look at the blogs in FireFox. What I see is a set of PHP script commands and a link to a CSS stylesheet.

Fortunately, WordPress (unlike Blogger) provides detailed instructions on how to back up your blog, and even those like me who know nothing about PHP and even less about SQL can follow them. It took me a bit of fiddling, but when I needed to move the Favorites Blog into a new directory, I was able to export the database, download it to my hard drive, and import it to the new database that was created when I reinstalled the WordPress software. I’m going to have to do this soon with my Author-izer™ Articles blog, because I messed something up fiddling with WordPress plugins. The entire database contents get stored as a single .csv (comma-separated values) text file, which can be opened in Excel or imported into anything that will read .csv files, which is most kind of database programs.

You can find the instructions for backing up and restoring WordPress databases at http://codex.wordpress.org/Backing_Up_Your_Database and http://codex.wordpress.org/Restoring_Your_Database_From_Backup.

Even though the posts are stored in the database, it’s important to back up the wp-content folder, because that contains your style sheet. If you’re not a whiz at CSS—and I’m not—you’ll want to be sure you have a copy of the original style sheet before you start modifying it to match your site layout. Since I downloaded templates for the blog I was working on last night (www.organize.com/blog/) as .zip files, I knew that even if I messed up the style sheet, I could extract the original from the .zip. Being the stubborn type, I just kept messing with it until I got the result I wanted.

If you have your own domain and use a commercial web host, you probably have WordPress available to you through your control panel. If not, you can always go to blogger.com.

But whatever software you use to create it—back up your blog!

Back Up Your Blog

After a total meltdown that took them offline for five hours (a long time in the life of a blog), Blogcritics.org's Eric Olsen offers this warning:

"HERE IS THE LESSON: anything of value on a computer - your home computer, work computer, laptop, servers that host your website, etc etc - must be backed up, ideally independently of the primary computer...It is YOUR responsibility to make sure this happens - lesson learned."

There follows a list of books and products to help you make your backups, headed by Implementing Backup and Recovery: The Readiness Guide for the Enterprise, written by four guys named David.

Most of you probably don't host a blog server, but if you have a blog, make your own backups of it periodically, just in case disaster strikes at your blog-host or ISP—unless, of course, you don't mind losing all your posts.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 12-24-04: He's making a list, he's backing it up

Dear FileSlinger clients, colleagues, and friends:

As any of you who have lost data in the past year will know, the best present you can give yourselves this holiday season is frequent, regular backups, now and in the year to come.

At this time of year, most of the Western world is thinking about lists. Lists of gifts to buy, lists of goals or resolutions for the New Year, lists of those to whom we need to send holiday or thank-you cards. (Not to mention all those "wish lists" that vendor sites like Amazon.com encourage you to create so other people can buy things for you.)

What would happen to you if you lost those lists? You could probably reconstruct your goals for the New Year. You probably know the addresses and phone numbers of your family members and closest friends by heart—or could get them from another family member.

But what about client contact information or newsletter subscribers? Those lists can easily run to hundreds, even thousands, of people. (Heck, I sent out 150 Solstice cards, and most of those were personal.)

Contact management programs like ACT! come with built-in backup options and reminders, and I encourage you to use them and to keep a copy of your contact backup on CD somewhere other than your office. (Like, say, a friend's house or a safe-deposit box.)

As for your marketing databases, take it from the E-zine Queen herself—no matter who manages it for you, you need to back up your list. (See her article "There Goes My List!" for more specifics.)

Right now, my Backup Reminder List is a small one. I run it through my own website's e-mail account feature. And even though my webhost has built-in redundancy and I can also create special website backups, I also keep a copy of it in a text file that gets saved along with all my other files, every time I start my computer. (That's generally several times a day.)

Before too long, however, I will need to move this list to a more sophisticated distribution system such as Constant Contact, Topica, Aweber, or Ecomincs (which is rated highly for providing shopping cart as well as e-mail campaign/ autoresponder capabilities.) These services allow people to subscribe and unsubscribe themselves, and maintain the databases on their servers. (They also save you having to send massive numbers of messages out through your ISP, and they comply with the spam laws.)

All these companies probably have better backup systems than we do, but disaster can still strike them, and it's best to keep a copy of your own list. You may not need to make a new one every week (unless you have a constant subscriber turnover), but once a month would be a good idea.

You do this by means of the "Export" feature. For example, suppose you use Constant Contact to manage your e-mail campaigns and you want to back up your list. Log in, click "Subscribers & Lists," and then click "Export." This takes you to a page where you can choose which information to export and whether to export to Comma Separated Values or to text. (You will usually want CSV.) Your browser will download the file to your hard drive automatically.

To make your backup, just copy the file onto a disk or external drive. (You might want to rename it or put it in a special folder so you remember what it is.) Then if you ever need to re-import your list of subscribers, you can. (This is also handy if you decide to switch from one list provider to another.)

Next week I'll be talking about End of Year backups. Until then, go forth and back up!

Sallie

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Remember, if are getting rid of an old computer and want to deduct it from your 2004 taxes, you need to drop it off before the end of December. That means removing your data from it first!

And if you're getting a new computer and want to deduct it from your 2004 taxes, you have one week left to shop. Call me if you need help.