Saving Nakedjen

In a panic over the inability to truly save my blog, I sent the following to my dear friend, Dave Winer, this morning:

Last night I was out with some friends and one of them has been blogging on a site hosted by Scriptwriting Magazine.  I guess their system and servers crashed and he lost his entire blog and all his posts.  He's only been blogging since September, but still!  Everything is gone!   

This caused me to panic.  My blog, as you may know, is hosted by Six Apart and Typepad.  So far, so good and nothing bad has happened and all my archives seem to be intact.  But what happens if they suddenly go out of business?  Or the servers just die? 

You know I'm just a tad clueless when it comes to this stuff.  But what I want to know is how I can assure that I have all the pieces of my blog should something go wrong with my hosting service. I'm thinking I need to create my own back-up.  But how would I do that??

I'm looking to you and your infinite wisdom and expertise.  I can do whatever it takes, I just need to know where to start.  And I'm sure it probably seems silly on one level.  They're just words!  But they're my words. And my history.  And sometimes it is nice to revisit it and see exactly what it was that you said on that particular Tuesday in October.  Or whenever it was.

Thanks for your help and guidance.

I actually do fear that some day things are not going to go so well and I'll lose all that I've written here.  Now, I admit that all that I've written here is not exactly brilliant or words that will change the course of history, but they are MY WORDS.  My history.  My personal documentation.   I'd like for it to remain accessible to me.

If that means that I have to go through some sort of archiving process, I'm willing to do that.  Certainly!  But I don't even know where to begin.  So I'm looking for some guidance.  I want to know how to save all that I've written here so that if, for some reason, the servers at Six Apart have an irretrievable crash or the folks at Six Apart just decide to pull the plug completely, I won't lose this very public yet very personal part of me, Nakedjen.

I'm hoping someone at Six Apart or Typepad will come forward and shed some light on this for me.  I really hate being in the dark.  It's the not knowing that makes me twitch!  We all know that I don't do so well when I twitch.

Comments

[Paul Ding]

Jen, I love your writing, and I love your pictures, and I'd hate to see them disappear. It's natural and good and holy that you expose your mind and body to the air and the sunlight, but when you're walking through 18 inches of snow, you want galoshes to keep your tootsies from freezing, and when you are sitting on a black iron chair that's been in the sunlight for hours, you want some sort of pants to keep your tushie from burning.

Your blog is far more sensitive than your tootsies and your tushie, and the world those bits and bytes live in is really hostile. Unlike you, it ought not go naked.

I don't know what kind of backups are done by 6Alive/Typepad, but I tell my customers that they should NEVER trust backups unless THEY have THEMSELVES verified that they're good. If that means getting your own site (nakedjen.com?), do it. (I've been hosting for years, but you know nothing about me. Ask Dave Winer. He surely knows someone who can be trusted.)

I did backups on a Vax as a work-study job during my last stint in college - and in May, the Vax serviceman told the college that the tape drive was kaput. None of the backups done in the last six months was any good. Oops! Was it Reagan that said we should "trust but verify"?

You can - and should - schedule your PC to download backups every night to your hard drive. You should also make copies of the backups periodically - once a month is OK, I suppose, but I recommend once a week - and get them in a remote location. Mail a CD-ROM to your childhood buddy, ask her to stash it beneath the sweat socks in her dresser. A different house protects you against fire. A different part of the country protects you against hurricane.

Or maybe you can have a friend across the country download your backups once a week. It keeps our computers happy if they get asked to do something important - otherwise, they get bored while we are sleeping. Bored children, especially bright ones, tend to get into mischief, and PCs are bright children.

But please do something soon. You and your blog are among the treasures of the internet. And if you ever happen into Lancaster, PA, my wife and I would love to have you for dinner.

[nakedjen]

Hi Paul,

Wow. What you just wrote on my blog created perhaps the biggest smile for me of the whole week. What a lovely post. I promise when I am next in Lancaster (and it could be as soon as June since DearSweetDave has relatives in Wyomissing), we will certainly enjoy a meal together.

I have tried to get nakedjen.com for a very long time and figured that it was my way to go as far as truly having complete "control" and archiving abilities for my blog. Unfortunately for me, some person in Germany owns nakedjen.com and doesn't seem to want to part with it. Even though he's doing absolutely NOTHING with it.

Meanwhile, I will admit that I rarely back anything up. Bad Nakedjen! I work on a Mac and realize I should have copies of things and not just trust that it all will be there tomorrow morning when I wake up.

So I'll take your comment to heart. I'll start saving things. Carefully. Because I do want to have these words accessible. Even if the servers and machines that host them fail me.

Thanks again for your very kind thoughts.

[bornfamous]

Doesn't Typepad offer any way to back up your blog? I'd be very surprised if they don't. Ask their customer support folks.

Btw, I'd be happy to host your blog for free. If you're interested in switching to Wordpress, it would import all of your entries very easily. Backups are automatic in WP [and its comment spam blocking is excellent.]

I'd be glad to take care of the switch for you and teach you how to use WP -- it's great. Too bad you can't get nakedjen.com, but I just checked and nakedjen is available with the extensions .net, .org, .info, and .us.

[cookie]

I don't know about TypePad, but Moveable Type (same company) had an 'export' feature. I'd look for something like that. The export is what can be 'imported' into other platforms, like Wordpress (I'm bias for WP), and is a very basic backup of your text.

If you're going to go whole hog and have your own domain name, you can also think about hosting your pictures versus using Flickr. Sure, lots of people use Flickr, but they too can up and disappear overnight while no one is watching.

Not that I want to scare you... reality is you've put most of your online life into someone else's electronic hands.

[nakedjen]

The pictures, I'm not so worried about. Because yes, they're on Flickr. But they're also on DVD's here at home. So yes, I've got them on Flickr so I can share, but I do have back-ups of that.

But the blog? That's my big worry. I am one of those bloggers that literally types into the little Typepad window and hits post. I don't do spell check. I don't edit. I don't even read what I wrote before I post. I just type and post. Whammo. You all really get what I'm thinking.

That is why I'd like to be able to actually know what I was thinking. This blog is my stream of consciousness, as it were. A record of my thoughts. So I just don't want it to vanish. Or go poof.

LaVonne, your offer to host my blog is a gracious one. I'm going to think about that. And I'm not afraid of WordPress. DearSweetDave just created a blog for me in WordPress. For Dreamsweet! I just have yet to actually make it live. But soon! Soon it will be live.

Hey, there's an idea. Maybe it's a simple as just moving this blog to:

www.dreamsweet.com/nakedjen!

[nakedjen]

I have another question. Maybe someone who's following this thread can answer this?

My bandwidth for this blog for this month is currently 47.3057 gigabytes. I have no idea if that is a big number or a little number. I just know that for my Typepad membership, I'm supposed to only get 5 gigabytes per month.

If we host this ourselves, at dreamsweet.com, and I use that kind of bandwidth, is my hosting service for dreamsweet going to charge me gazillions of dollars?

Does someone know that answer?

[nakedjen]

The last laugh is on me. Ha! I just exported this entire blog. Into a text file. And I will now put that file on a CD or something and send it to my friend in Tennessee and ask her to put it in her sock drawer.

And I'll do that once a month from now on.

But I also will still consider moving to our own domain.

But Typepad did come through. I just needed to ask.

[bornfamous]

Yay! I *thought* there must be a way to do it, since Movabletype allows exporting. As for being charged gazillions for 47 G's per month, better ask your host at dreamsweet.com. Some hosts do charge a lot more, others don't. You might want to switch to my host, which offers 2 TB [I guess that's terabytes] bandwidth for $7.95/mo. If you do, please use this link: http://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?174970 -- I'd like to get the referral. :)

[Scott McNulty]

Looks like you're all set, but I did a little screencast last year explaining how to backup your Typepad blog:

http://blog.blankbaby.com/blankbaby/2005/12/howto_export_yo.html

The login has changed a little since last year, but the overall process is the same.

[Anil Dash]

Hi Jen, I work with the TypePad team at Six Apart, and I'm glad you found the export feature -- all of our products have one (amazingly, not all blogging tools do!) and we're big believers that you should own your data and have control over it. Dave's been a good advocate for that idea for a long time, and we've been listening.

Also, anytime you have these questions, that's what our support team is here for. Looks like they got an answer for you already, but don't be shy about asking for help in the future. :)

[Scorpio]

I just download mine periodically and put it to a CD. Not hard at all on Typepad.