why and how to back up my blogs

---------------why I need to back up my blogs

I need to back up my blog -- I anticipated this, but I did nothing yet.

This is important to me, because I begin to move all my high level notes to my blogs – and I really like the result. It forces me to be honest when I blog, and it forces me to be objective and therefore also honest when I make my notes. It accelerates my thinking, and keeps my thinking “open”.

However, there is a downside, literally: if the blog is down, I am in trouble. Without my notes, i.e., my blogs, I do not even know how to think – I need to check my notes/blogs.

It has already happened once: last week, when I wanted to check my notes, the blog site was down for maintenance, for (just) 30 minutes or an hour (but in the middle of the day) – it scared me.

As I said, I did anticipate the need. I chose google, because I believe it is reliable and will last for a while, at least, so that I can postpone the need for a while.

----------------how to backup my blogs

A. I checked the blog site, found the following:
http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=41447&topic=8911

I do not like the approach; I will not use the approach.

B. IE’s "Synchronize" (add the website to favorite; organize favorite>property>download can limit link levels, and/or whether following outside links).

It saves the site C:\WINDOWS\Offline Web Pages (it is not clear, I global searched my site name to figure this out) -- it is a binary file.

I guess you can always save individual web files (html, jpg etc.) manually from it offline; so, the real thing is to make sure that you have a copy of the IE that you used to save it -- assuming MS will certainly keep the newer version be able to read older versions data file, so, this perhaps is not a big deal.

It is like the outlook archive files for my emails. They are big, and they are in binary, only outlook can read it. However, emails are not supposedly to be kept long anyway: if it is important, save it outside email. However, blogs are important -- it is my high level notes, part of my external brain.

So, it is worth it to give it another try, see below.

C. I need to “mirror" blog site, i.e. recursively retrieve all links from my blog site.

I prepared to try both of the following:

http://www.httrack.com/ ---- I tried

http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/manual/wget.html ---- I did not try this one

The first one works fine; so, I did not try the second one. Also, it seems that wget is not easy to set up.

The nice thing about it is that it reveals that, the “links to this post” (on the bottom-right of the post) links to the “definitive page” (I give it the name), which contains comments. Further, all those “definitive pages” are organized by year and month. So, I only need to pay attention to survic.blogspot.com\2006\04, 05, 06, etc. Within each folder, I have posts like 8-basic-programming-techniques-v5.html, beyond-java-and-ruby-envy.html, etc. I am hoping when I put jpg there, it will be still so neat.

Happy blogging!!