This post was written for the students of the Columbia College Chicago class Blogging: Beyond the Basics in the Fall semester of 2014. It likely refers to specific software or settings that may quickly be out of date and may not apply to your situation, even in a future semester of the same class.

I mentioned this in class a few weeks ago and showed you where a simple backup function is, but it bears repeating: Back Up Your Blog. Especially since we’re using the blog as the main place where your graded content lives, you’ll probably want to make sure that in the unlikely event something happens to your blog that you have a backup.

On the administration sidebar is Tools and under that is a choice for Export. If you leave All Content selected and click Download Export File, WordPress will generate a single file that has all your Posts, Pages, and any Comments you’ve received. It will not have any of your uploads (images, etc) but that does mean for your new blog it’ll be a very small file. The export for this blog right now is 74 KB, which is about the size of a normal Word document. It makes it easy to email it to yourself, or throw it on a USB drive, or put it on your Dropbox or Google Drive. The file even has the date included in the name, so you can keep multiple versions of the backup.

There are plug-ins you could install that will automate backups for you, either storing them on the server (which probably won’t work on our server, given how locked down it is), or emailing it to you automatically.