Blog Backup?

After I read someone’s blog complaining that her several years’ blog was gone all of a sudden without any backup plans, I felt a little vulnerable and frightened as well, since my Windows Live Spaces is basically what I have online and it covers almost everything about me. So it means a lot to me and surely it needs its backup at this point when I have been a blogger here since 2005. The good thing is that I forgot that I have had my alternative ways to keep my blogs somewhere safe in case the Microsoft’s server is messed up or they stop Spaces service someday. Yes, Windows Live Writer is basically the best way to do so-it automatically stores the posts or drafts on the computer local hard drive. And of course since nothing is perfect, the flaw of this method is WLW cannot keep the previous posts which were not published via WLW, as I haven’t figured out how to download those posts into my WLW. So for those posts, we can either subscribe to Google Reader or other readers to keep them there, or use some other software to download all the posts to our local hard drives. I have used some software to download the posts one by one and it was pretty much very tedious and of course no fun at all, so I gave up.

Anyway, let us hope WLS will thrive in the next couple of years so we don’t have to worry about the data loss. Once again, I have to say after all these years, WLS has been stable and consistent and I have to give it the credit for that. Since Wordpress and Blogger (two of the most successful blog services) are blocked in China, I have no other choices as well. Plus WLS is connected to MSN Messenger and it’s more convenient. Still, I think the removal of the little star from MSN Messenger telling people the blog update was a bad move for MSN and as far as I know lots of people gave up on WLS due to that.

So let’s see. I hope I will still be able to babble here after many years.