After reading this horror story from one of my favorite bloggers, Kym at Travel Babbles, who had her blog hacked into,

I thought about how devastating it would be to lose my online journal.

I can't imagine how it would feel to lose everything I've written on here forever.

Reading the comments I noticed that blogger hackers are all too common,

so I immediately backed up all my files on here, and it is a huge relief!

If you aren't sure how to back up every aspect of your blog, let me help!

1. Back up your blog's posts, comments, and images

Go to your Dashboard > Settings > Other

Click Export blog (as seen below)

This window will pop up > click Download Blog

Your blog will download in .xml version, with the date you downloaded it as the name of the file.

This is nice because you can know the last time you downloaded your blog in full.

This .xml file can be opened in Adobe Dreamweaver, if you have zero clue what that is, don't worry about it.

All you need to know is that by exporting your blog, you have all of your posts, images, and comments saved in one document, and if you ever need to access them you will be able to as long as you can locate it on your computer.

For that reason, I would make a new folder titled: Blog Backup and save your backed up file there.

2. Back up your Template.

Dashboard > Template > Backup / Restore

This will save all of the little details that make your blog unique, such as the colors and fonts of your post titles, tabs, etc.

If you can have access to your template, it will save you the trouble of having to redesign your blog to get it exactly how it was before.

Clicking Backup / Restore will also download your template in .xml version, except this time the file name won't have the date, instead it will look something like > template-315471233.xml

I recommend renaming this to include the date you downloaded the file, I named mine Template-2-18-14.xml.

These two steps allow you to have all your blog design information saved onto your computer.

Lastly, if you want to be extra safe, I would go the extra mile and have your posts and comments emailed to you, and you can put them all in a folder/folders.

I created a new email just for this blog, so that every time I create a post or someone comments, it will be sent to this email and I can organize it on there.

To have your posts and comments sent to your email, go to

Dashboard > Settings > Mobile and Email