I have worked on computers for years.  I know the one secret passed on from one computer worker to another is ‘be sure to keep your work backed up’.  I remember one day when a server crashed at work.  One of my friends had been working on a project for 3 months – and kept it all on the server since it was a shared application he was building.  Come to find out, the person in charge of backing up the server every night had not been checking it.  The automatic backup had quit working 3 months before.

Last night I decided to change the theme to one of my blogs Be The Weight You Want.  I had exported my posts and everything before when I moved it off the wordpress.com.  Then I had done an export once in a while to backup my work.  I had also been warned by others and by reading about blogging to keep my work backed-up.

Guess what?  I didn’t back it up.  I started running into problems and still didn’t make an export file.  Then I was locked out of the site admin – no way to do an export then.  And no recourse but to uninstall the wordpress, then re-install it.  Luckily, I decided to save it the hard way – go to every post and page and save the html.  At least that way I saved all my posts.

Do you back up your work regularly?  It is much easier to export your posts and comments, etc, and save them to your hard drive than it is to save every page.  And with the export file, you can import them back in when you re-install.  All the dates, tags, categories, comments – everything comes right back up.

Why should you backup your blog?  To protect your work – that you put time and effort into.  The work that made your blog’s ranking in the search engines.  The work that people come back to even months after you published it.  The work that goes out over your RSS feed.

Anyone else had to go through this?  Leave a comment and tell your experience, or any tips you have for safeguarding your work.