It’s not enough to back up your blog template because it is not the look and feel of your blog site that matters. It is what you have to say that counts.
If you have a separate corporate blog that links to your corporate website, then it’s important to think about backing up your blog content. Your blog site is a tool; it educates your customers, it demonstrates your expertise and it helps to drive traffic to your website. You don’t want to lose all that search engine traction or the comments and interactions with your customers.
Let’s say you have a blog set up at WordPress.com. I know WordPress backs up blogs, but I recommend you learn to export your blog content yourself and do it often, especially if you change content daily. It is also a good idea when you have multiple users assigned to your blog. Administrators and editors are able to delete posts or pages and there would be no way to restore material that is accidentally removed from your blog.
Use the WordPress dashboard (WordPress Database Backup Plugin) to export or use FTP to download both your database and filebase (XML files). This filebase should contain your posts, media (video and images) pages, plugins, comments, categories, and tags.
If the worst thing should happen – your blog site crashes- having a contingency plan is a good idea. The plan should include the following:
– Restore the database from the backup file.
– Upload (FTP) your most recent backed up blog filebase.
– Use Google or Yahoo search engine “cache” feature to recover any recent articles that were posted after the last backup. It may be that one of the main search sites (Google, Yahoo and Bing) indexed and cached, or saved, the content of a page from one of your recent posts.
Exporting your blog content does not necessarily mean the templates associated with your blog are backed up. Template backups should be available by your blog account provider.