Because backing up is (not) hard to do

Jasia at the Creative Gene highlights the importance of backing up your blog to guard against losing all your posts should anything untoward happen. I admit, I’m as guilty as the next person of forgetting to do this, but it is important not just because of the risk of your blog being hacked, but also because servers and computer technology are unpredictable at times and losing all your work because of a glitch would be heartbreaking.

Backing up is pretty simple -

If you are using WordPress (either .com or .org) go to ‘Manage/Export’ where you will be given the option to download the file to your computer. There are also plugins which can be installed if you have self-hosted WordPress which will create a backup automatically. You will find these in the plugins section of the wordpress.org site, just check the one you choose is compatible with the version of WP you are using.

If you use Blogger just click the ‘Settings’ tab and on the first page you will see the ‘Export’ link. Once again it is easy, you just save the file to your computer.

I’m not sure of the details for other blogging platforms but all good ones will have something similar.

If you have a traditional website, you will probably have copies of your pages saved on your pc. However, there is a free programme HTTrack which can  download your site in its entirety, so if the worst happens you can simply upload it again.

If you think you might forget to back up regularly, try setting up a weekly reminder using Google Calendar, Sandy or Free-minder so that you receive an email to nudge you to do it.

Edited to add: Thanks to Jasia for reminding me! If you want to back up your Blogger blog you need to use Blogger in Draft which is the Beta, or test version, of the Blogger dashboard. There are a number of extra features in addition to the Import/Export tool. Some don’t work quite as they should, and some disappear, but on the whole they are functional. To access Blogger in Draft go to this page. Once you are there you can make it your default dashboard by clicking the little icon at the top right of the page.

Just popping in

We are in the middle of the long summer holidays here, so I’m not doing a great deal of blogging or genealogy. However, I did have a rummage a couple of days ago looking for more information about the STALLAN family from Duxford in Cambridgeshire and, to my delight, came across the will of my 9 x great grandfather, John Stallan which not only provided some useful family details, but also revealed the fact that his wife Elizabeth, my great grandmother, had been a widow at the time of their marriage. Great stuff! I had assumed her surname at that time was her maiden name and had been trying to find her under that name for a long time. Not so good, the parish registers in Duxford (St. John) don’t include a mother’s maiden on baptism records, so she only appears as Elizabeth in the entries for the children from both her marriages Even more infuriating, I realised from the dates that my 10x great grandfather John SWANN was the curate at St. Johns when many of these babies were baptised and therefore may have been responsible for the omission.

You know those questions often posed on genealogy forums, the ones that ask ‘if you had a time machine who would you visit?’ I think my answer will now have to be, John Swann, to suggest he takes a bit more notice of mothers, not just because it is the right thing to do, but also because it might avoid his granddaughter banging her head against her monitor screen.