Schinckel.net

I didn’t realize this until the other day, but it’s possible to back up every post you’ve ever made using an offline client, such as the excellent ecto. I use the Mac version of this great program, and to back up every post I’ve ever made is as simple as:

• Find out how many posts you have made.
• Tell ecto to download this many recent posts.
• Press the Refresh button.

The first one is easy: when you first log into your Blogsome blog, you’ll see on the dashboard a panel like:

Blog Stats There are currently 393 posts and 284 comments, contained within 19 categories.

Getting this info to your offline composer might be difficult - each one has different settings. In ecto, choose the Account in the main window (Entries & Drafts), and then go to the ecto→Preferences… menu (keyboard shortcut: Cmd-, ). In the window that appears, choose the Recent Entries tab.

I use the following settings: Store copies of published entries locally, uncheck Retrieve titles and summaries only, and insert the desired number of entries to retrieve. Then, click Save, and press Refresh in the main view. It might take some time if you have a lot of entries, but it’s nice to know you have a backup.

Oh, and if you do regular backups, you can set the value to a reasonable value, like 10 or 20, and make sure you do it every now and then before you’ve posted that many new posts. If you make any edits to old posts, they’ll only get picked up in a large backup like this one, though.

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If you are using another client, the instructions will be similar, but you may have to search around for a while before you find where to change the number of entries to retrieve. Good luck: happy backup.