How to backup your blog using Feedburner and Gmail

Posted on October 15, 2007 at 9:25 am

Make sure to read other posts from the Backup Data series!

Here’s a really simply and easy to implement way to back up your blog using two of my favorite tools: Gmail and Feedburner. There are many ways you can go about backing up your blog right now, such as using an online tool like BlogBackupOnline, using WordPress plugins like WP Database Backup, or by simply using FTP to download everything to your computer.

All of the above-mentioned methods are the RECOMMENDED ways to back up your blog by me and just about everyone else, but all too many times people get lazy and end up neglecting this very important procedure! It’s happened to me once and I almost lost my entire site simply because I was not backing up my blog routinely.

However, even with this knowledge, there are some days that I do not get a chance to back up my latest posts because of various reasons. In this case if my I were to lose everything on my hosting server (I have a daily backup scheduled on my hosting site, but they have lost all of their backups at one point too) , I would end up losing a day or two worth of posts written. Losing 2 days worth of posts is still quite a bit considering it’s about 4 to 5 actual posts.

So while playing around and trying to figure out a method where I could have my posts automatically backed up locally (not on my hosting site’s servers) without having to use FTP or run a plugin or basically do anything manually, I came up with a very simple solution: subscribe to my Feedburner email subscription with a Gmail address that includes a label that will be automatically filtered to my archives when it comes in.

Using your Feedburner email subscription, any new posts you publish will automatically be sent to your subscribers. Add yourself in with your normal Gmail address plus a label, i.e. Aseem1234+blogbackup@gmail.com and have it filtered to your archives! Viola! Now your entire posts will be emailed to you and saved in your Google account whenever you publish.

Of course in order to set this up, you’ll need to be using Feedburner to manage your feeds. However, I think that most bloggers including Blogger bloggers now use Feedburner to manage all of their feeds. To setup email subscriptions on your feed, log into Feedburner and click on the Publicize tab. You’ll see the option Email Subscriptions in the left menu.

FeedBurner has specific instructions on how to set it up for WordPress, Blogger, and TypePad. If you need more information on how to set it up, just search in Google.

Once you have that setup, let’s go to your Gmail account and setup a new label and filter. Once logged in, click on Edit Labels at the bottom left of them Gmail screen.

Under Create a new label, type in the word “blogbackup” as one word. You can choose a different label if you like, just keep using that for the next step also.

Click Create to create the new label. Now click on Filters from the Settings menu to setup the filter. Click Create a New Filter at the bottom. For Step 1, enter your email address followed by a “+” sign and the word for your label, in our case “blogbackup” into the To: box. It should look like this:

Click Next step and check off “Skip the Inbox (Archive it)” to have the emails automatically moved from your Inbox to the archived folder. Also, check “Apply the Label” and choose the label we just created, blogbackup.

Click Create Filter and you’re done. Now go ahead and test it by sending an email to MyEmailAdd+blogbackup@gmail.com and you should see it go directly to your archives with the label blogbackup for easy access.

A very simple method to backup your blog posts and should only be used to complement other blog backup strategies, but useful in case your blog backup is a few days old when you lose everything. You can think of this as a kind of differential backup!

[tags]blog backup, backup blogs, how to backup a blog, automatic blog backup, backups[/tags]

» Filed Under Blogging

Comments

10 Responses to “How to backup your blog using Feedburner and Gmail”

Shivaranjan said on : October 15th, 2007 at 1:20 pm

Another good feature about this method is that your feedburner count would get increased by +1

Nirmal said on : October 16th, 2007 at 6:25 am

I think its just like subscribing to your own blog and filtering the email. Good find though!

talkinblues said on : December 14th, 2007 at 2:09 am

I tried this technique but it only emailed me an exerpt and the feed, and I have to click the link to get the full post. As a back-up of the post this is useless: it’s onlty backing up the first few lines. How do I change the delivered feed to make it deliver the whole post instead?

akishore said on : December 14th, 2007 at 2:27 pm

Talkinblues, you have set your feed to show full feeds and then you will get the entire post. It’s set to show only partial feeds at this point that’s why you get only a summary.

SonDan said on : April 23rd, 2008 at 8:19 pm

I want to try this since I have experience posts being lost first hand without proper backups. My questions is – even if I start this instant beginning with my very next post … is it possible to go back to get my other blogs emailed to me or am I just SOL having to start with the now and not go backwards?

Thanks for reading.

Arnie said on : December 18th, 2009 at 10:42 am

This seems like a pretty convoluted way to backup a database! If you are using Wordpress, check out this official article on how to backup your WordPress database:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Bac.....r_Database

Also, check out the WordPress Backup Plugin:

http://wordpress.org/extend/pl.....ss-backup/

These are all way better and more reliable methods than the one mentioned above!

Disaster Planning: Backups for Bloggers « timethief’s tips and links Says:

[...] entire posts will be emailed to you and saved in your Google account whenever you publish.” -> Read more here Hat tip to Netty [...]
October 30th, 2007 at 11:41 am
Disaster Planning: Backups for Bloggers « wpbloggingtips Says:

[...] to you and saved in your Google account whenever you publish.” -> Hat tip to Netty Gritty.Read more here « Offline Blog Editors Reviews Different Usernames for Different Personas [...]
November 6th, 2007 at 5:07 pm
Nosselinfea » Blog Archive » easy backup of your blog Says:

[...] an easy way to do it automatically. Please note, I didn’t find this myself, I found it on this random web-page, but the instructions were a little vague. Although there are some handy screenshots, if my [...]
December 13th, 2007 at 6:58 pm
Disaster Planning: Backups for Bloggers « one cool site Says:

[...] How to backup your blog using Feedburner and Gmail – “Subscribe to my Feedburner email subscription with a Gmail address that includes a label that will be automatically filtered to my archives when it comes in. Using your Feedburner email subscription, any new posts you publish will automatically be sent to your subscribers. Hat tip to Netty Gritty. Add yourself in with your normal Gmail address plus a label, i.e. Aseem1234+blogbackup@gmail.com and have it filtered to your archives! Viola! Now your entire posts will be emailed to you and saved in your Google account whenever you publish.” -> Read more here [...]
February 18th, 2008 at 4:53 pm