How's This for a New Year's Tradition? Blog Back-Up Day!

After watching several of my blogging brothers and sisters go through big changes when their servers lost old posts, I reacted decisively by doing nothing for a full year. Even though I refused to address the problem I still let it bother me a little and add anxiety to my life. You know, standard operating procedure. I took it one step farther by writing the posts in my email program where I would save them as a draft email. The only problem? I would edit them extensively after they were on the blog, so not only hadn't I backed the blog up, I had a screwed-up version that would need massive corrections if they were ever to be used. This is all part of the old me - the me that ended back in 2006.

I recently went into a cleaning frenzy, going through everything I own over the course of 6 days and sorting it all out. This sounds like something that would be mentally healthy, but guess again. In my dysfunctional hands, it turned into an addiction so I awoke this morning wondering what else I could do to put things in order. At this point I can't stop. That's how the New Tradition was born.

Today is the day all bloggers should backup their files. After wondering for a full year how in hell you did that, I came up with my own way. I put on a football game and then began copying entire months of text over to a Word document. I was surprised that my Apple computer could copy that much in a single gulp and then heave it back up over in Word. In around half an hour I had copied my entire blog for 2006.

Now, admittedly, you don't get the pictures or drawings, but you do get the times and dates of the text. You also do not get the comments which is a damn shame but at least you get how many comments there were.

Lastly, I saved the Word document as "The Portland Freelancer 2006" and then dumped it onto a CD, which is now in my box of important papers, where I will never see it again.

Of course, this burst of initiative would not be complete if I didn't turn right around and head-trip everybody else about it. Seriously though, if you recall the unbelievable nightmare Jack Bogdanski went through, and the long struggle to reconstruct his posts using search engines, etc...this would be the best day of the year to backup your blog. Or not. Your call.