Clear Blue Dei

As you may have read in my post BlogBackupOnline: Great Idea but not reliable, I did some testing and had some big concerns about this product and the rave reviews it was getting from others.

After corresponding with Aaron from Techrigy and getting good and thorough answers from him, I feel a lot better about BlogBackupOnline. At the end of this post you will find the answers I received from Aaron regarding each item I noted in my previous post.

It is currently beta and acts like a beta release, in other words, it is quirky and has some bugs. But it is definitely far enough along to see that it is going to be very nice and that they are putting a lot of thought and effort into making it a good and stable product.

I got a little worked up mainly because it seemed that people and tech reviews were treating it like a finished product and when I tested it, it clearly was still in beta testing and was not as good (at this point) as they were leading people to believe.

But I am going to recommend that you take a look at it and see what it has and will do. It has some amazing features and is a very ambitious project, especially for being offered for free. Remember that it is still beta, but go get a feel for it and remember it because I think it will set the standard in blog backup sites before very long. I certainly look forward to when it out of beta and will definitely review it again then.

And Aaron very thoroughly addressed everything I had written in my email to Techrigy. I had said that I felt I received a ‘form letter’ reply, but after the weekend, Aaron wrote me a very good email addressing everything I’d found. So I will leave you with a copy of what he wrote so you can read the answers for yourself.

~Susan Mellott

Email Response from Aaron of Techrigy:

I’ve just done some regression tests and put out a patch. I’ll try to address everything you’ve brought up. The patch fixed a few problems:

1 The restoration process was incorrectly counting how many posts it had restored (effectively doubling it) which is why it was only restoring about 27 posts. It’s been fixed so it should properly restore 50 posts now.

2 When the restoration job stops after 50 posts, it was not properly writing a message into the log. I added a warning to the job log when someone attempts to restore more than 50 posts to blogger - “You attempting to restore more than 50 posts to Blogger. Only the first 50 posts will be restored. Successfully restored 50 blog posts.”

3 I added an informational message to the Restoration Wizard: “IMPORTANT NOTE ON RESTORING TO BLOGGER!!! In order to reduce splogs, Blogger will only allow 50 posts per day to be restored. If you are attempting to restore more than 50 posts to Blogger, you will have to use this Restore wizard to restore 50 posts per day until all post have been transfered.”

4 One the Content tab, I moved the pagination to the top of the grid. A handful of people have told me they can not get to the pagination control at the bottom of the screen - I’ve tried every combination of browsers (IE6,IE7, FireFox, Safari, Opera) and operating systems and haven’t been able to recreate it, so I haven’t been able to fix it. Hopefully moving pagination to the grid header will alleviate the problem. Any insight into the browser or configuration you are using that might be causing the problem?

NOTE by me: no idea why the bottom pagination was problematic, but it works just fine now at the top of the list.

5 Removed references to “changed blog posts”. When we read an entry, the white space often changes. For instance, if we read it through the feed versus when we screen scrape, we get some small changes to the content in the white space. We maintain a full history of changes so all versions are maintained so that not copies are ever lost, but these white space issues can confuse people, so I’ve simply taken the reference to them in the job messages out.

Bugs that still need to be addressed:

1 In reference to duplicate entries backup up with http://alongthepathto20.blogspot.com/. If you are using Feedburner combined with Blogger, the backup we collect has duplicate entries. Recently after acquiring Feedburner, Blogger started integrating Feedburner which has caused these hiccups. This problem occurs because we read an entry by screen scraping and get one permalink to the entry, then when we read the feed through feedburner, it’s has a different permalink (your feedburner entries go back through August 3rd which is why the duplicates go back to that date and stop). I’m working on a fix, but it’s not straight forward. To avoid the problem, you can disable the feedburner temporarily, but that not adequate -we’ll have to build a solution as time permits. For now you have duplicate entries - better to have 2 copies than to potential miss some content.

2 Restoring in chronoligical order. Right now it pulls the posts and just restore them in the order they are in the database which is arbitrary. If it restores everything, no problem - they are restored in arbitrary order but doesn’t really matter since they are assigned the appropriate post dates. If you select the entries to restore, no problem - again restored in arbitrary order but it gets to all of them. But when it gets to 50 and stops, its just taken the first 50 it pulled out of the database. Harmless but confusing.

I’ll try to answer your questions as well:

1 it shows how many posts and comments but not how many pictures (and actually, somewhere along the line, it quit reporting comments).

ANSWER - I’ve put this as a feature request to show how many pictures it’s backed up. If it doesn’t report comments or blogs found, that should mean it found zero. I’ll put a feature request as well to change this, since I can see how it would be confusing.

2 It says it is free for now while in beta, but approx how much will it cost in the future? I could not find a price on any ofthe products you offer, they all said to contact sales which makes me think it must be expensive

ANSWER - We are hoping to offer BlogBackupOnline for free as long as possible. I don’t foresee charging for it anytime soon. It is actually quite expensive to maintain for us, $698 per month hosting cost because it requires raid drives, tape backups, redundant network connections, class A hosting space, etc… in order to ensure the content is truly protected. If we did need to charge, we would likely charge $5-$10 per month. We also develop business products that have nothing to do with BlogBackupOnline. If those are successful, BlogBackupOnline should remain free indefinitely. Of course, many of the features you are request are slow to be implemented because we don’t charge for it which is a good point for offering a paid version.

3 it would be nice to be able to restore from and to a certain date, especially with the 50 post limitation in Blogger (and possibly in other blog engines)

ANSWER - great feature request. I’ll see if I can implement something like that.

4 it didn’t restore my tags/labels and I wonder if it would have if I was going blogger to blogger or any of the same type. (the answer was no after I tried it)

ANSWER - right now it doesn’t restore tags/labels (even from blogger to blogger). That’s been on the feature enhancement list for a while, so I hope to get to that soon.

5 my social networking and bookmarks icons on bottom of each post copied over and works, but points to my original blog. I can understand why, but it does still create a problem.

ANSWER - yes, I agree this is not ideal. I’ll look at various enhancements to replace links to the old website with links to the new website. Probable won’t happen quickly given the complexity.

6 when I click on content for my blog, I only see the last 10 posts and there is no way to scroll down through my earlier posts.

ANSWER - Your not the first person to encounter this problem. I made an adjustment to the pagination control. I hope that helps.

7 it is confusing on the restore screen when it shows nothing in the box on the ‘what entries do you want to restore’ screen. It seems like there is nothing to restore. I figured out that I needed to ‘load blog entries’ but it would be much less confusing if they loaded when I entered that screen.

ANSWER - Yes, I can understand the confusion. If you have a page with many entries, loading when the page opens can be a major head ache, which is why it doesn’t load upon opening the screen. I’ll take another look and determine a better/clearer way to handle.

8 on the ‘what entries do you want to restore’ screen, it would be useful if there is a limit on a blog engine as to how many posts can be restored each day, to state that on the page and to give an error if more than that number of posts were selected.

ANSWER - Great suggestions. I’ll put this on the short list - shouldn’t be to complicated to add but I couldn’t get to this weekend.

9 the restore screen says NOTE: The major blog platforms do not support restoring comments. The comments we have backed up will be added to the end of the post’s text. But WordPress imports posts, comments, custom fields, pages, and categories from a WordPress export file and posts, comments, and users from a Blogger blog and posts and comments from a Movable Type or Typepad blog

ANSWER - Yes, Wordpress can import those. We are limited to using the APIs like Metaweblogs which doesn’t expose these capabilities. I’ll look at other features time permitting, but I’m afraid without major rework its still quite difficult. Perhaps WordPress 2.3 (just released) has some capabilities built into the API these days.

10 the export tab lets me export my backup to a file on my hard drive. But what can I do with this file when I have it if I want to restore from it? will Wordpress import it?

ANSWER - The export file is not designed to be imported into WordPress directly. Its XML, so anyone could write an XSLT to convert it into whatever format they needed. For now, its simply a backup copy for your own piece of mind. Worst case scenario you will always have the content that can be imported if need be. We are working on an import.

11 and if so, why not the comments as comments?

ANSWER - good suggestion. We should write comments as their own nodes. But we just havent gotten around to it yet.

12 Since there is no name/password required to backup a blog, I believe you could essentially backup almost anyone’s blog (or certain posts) and restore them to your own blog. (I think you could do this with other backup tools also since they use the public RSS feeds)

ANSWER - Yes, absolutely. BlogBackupOnline is like a copier machine. I could take a Picasso down to Kinko’s and copy it and put it on my wall at home -but it doesn’t make it a Picasso We discourage this and respond promptly to any DCMA notices - but technically we can’t prevent it. It hasn’t been a problem so far and we hope it won’t.

I hope this helps. Since you’ve beat me up pretty good in public, I’ll take it you don’t like the product even as a free public service. That’s your right. But honestly, BlogBackupOnline is by far the most full feature, documented blog backup system out there. It require no software and even gives you the storage for free, and works with more platforms than any other solutions. It backs up the blog posts, the comment, and the images linked to from you blog. It’s automated to run daily backups - you set it up and forget it until you need it. All for free.

Yes, you encountered some bugs with restoring which is my fault - Iapologize and hope we corrected it. And I realize some of the content you backed up was very confusing because it got duplicate entries. I’ll keep trying to make it more logical and polished. But I’ll stressed, every blog you enter was (and continues to be with no effort by you) 100% backed up. All your content is safe from loss at this point. Restoration is not perfect, but it works the best it can given the limitations of Blogger. Again it was very confusing in your situation, and I’m sorry for that again.

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In my last post - “Google Blogger Tip: How to Backup Your Blogger Blog“, I talked about two ways I had found to backup a Google Blogger blog since it does not have a backup capability built in.

One involved using a WordPress blog to backup it up to since Wordpress will import almost everything (posts, comments, pictures) from many blog engines and export posts/comments to a file. That will only give you a full restore though, you can’t selectively restore posts. Another was to download a free program called Blogger Backup on CodePlex that gives you a basic backup of your posts and will allow you to backup and restore your posts, both to your original Blogger blog or to a new Blogger blog (but not your comments, pictures or categories)

But in looking around and reading other posts, I thought I had found an even better way to backup your Google Blogger Blog (or any other blog). PC World named it as one of the 25 Web Sites to Watch and several blog posts were written favorably about it such as this post from WebWare or this post from Download Squad.

What it is is an online site called BlogBackupOnline that allows you backup a variety of blog types and you can set it to do a full backup the first time and then daily backups. It also backs up images such as various picture formats that you have on that site and they plan to add support for videos as well. It also backs up and restores comments, although it puts the comments on the end of each post they belong to as part of the post. Still, that is better than Blogger Backup at this point. You can do a full restore or you can choose posts to restore.

BlogBackupOnline supports Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, Friendster, LiveJournal, Serendipity, Windows Live Space, Movable Type, Terapad, and Vox. And they will be adding support for more platforms soon. NOTE: I guess they mean to run a backup against since it only gives Blogger, WordPress, LiveJournal or Windows Live Spaces as options to restore to.

You get 50meg of space free to backup your data. As an example of what that holds, I have backed up this blog up to this point using it and I had 80 posts, 41 comments and some number of images (they don’t report the number of images you have stored) and I used 989 kb which is approximately 1 meg.

It has a very good and complete help and here’s a link to small PDF file brochure for it. Everything about this program is very professional looking.

Sounds great so far, doesn’t it? That is what I thought and I tried it and was impressed with how easy it was and how nicely it was done. That is, until I really started looked at what happened with my backups and restores. Because they didn’t work right and that is really what it is all about, regardless of what bells and whistles something does or doesn’t have.

My backups and restores were so wonky that I thought I must have done something wrong. So I re-tried it, backing up a different blog and restoring it to a different blog engine and it still was all messed up. I honestly can’t figure out why it is so messed up. I keep wanting to blame myself because surely it can’t be that flakey. But even if I did something that caused it to flake out, I was being very careful and if it is that touchy (and on more than 1 occasion) then you still certainly can’t count on it.

Here’s what happened. The first time, I did a full backup on my WordPress blog clear.bluedei.com which had (according to blogbackuponline) 80 posts and 41 comments. Then I restored it in full to a Blogger blog (blog.bluedei.com). It restored only about 27 of my posts. The restored posts seemed random too, some from Sept, some from August and some from July.

I had used another blogger backup program and it said that there was a Blogger limit of 50 posts per day that could be put on blogger so I was wondering what BlogBackupOnline would do. I was surprised that it reported that my restore was successful and that nowhere did it say that not all my posts were restored, not even in the log which said ‘finished with no error’. And I thought that at least I would have 50 posts restored and was surprised at only 27ish and random at that. I didn’t even realize I didn’t get a full restore until I really looked, since it appeared to have backed up everything OK.

I wrote to the Techrigy support about this (and several other comments that I’ve posted at the end of this blog) and did not get much of a response (”Sorry you experienced these problems. We are looking at the issues and will let you when we figure out what caused the problems you encountered. Thanks for trying out BlogBackupOnline”). I had written a pretty detailed email and to be honest, this just sounded like a generic response that didn’t lead me to believe they had even read my email. Maybe I’m cynical, but that’s what I thought.

I thought I would try it again and backup my Along the Path to 2.0 Blogger blog and then restore it to my blog.bluedei.com Blogger blog and my testxx.wordpress.com Wordpress blog. I set up the testxx blog to use for testing this specifically and the blog.cleardei.com blog was used for testing the different blog engines in the post series I wrote.

I ran a full backup of Alongthepathto20 and it reported 84 blog entries (with 1 changed, not sure what that meant) and cut off before it said the number of comments (or maybe was saying there were none). Now this was more blog entries than I had so that seemed suspicious right off the bat. Then it shows that it ran another full backup right after this one (although I only ran 1) and all it said was the number of changed entries was 4 (whatever that meant, I wasn’t changing anything on that blog). Both reported they finished with no errors.

Then I went to the content page for this blog (you can see about the latest 10 posts it backed up) and there were duplicates for each post I could see. So I restored the full backup to my blogger blog.bluedei.com and my wordpress testxx.wordpress.com. Both reported Finished with No Error. They had no posts before I ran the restore. You can see the results of each restore and compare it to the originally backed up alongthepathto20.blogspot.com by looking at each blog.

As you can see, the blogger blog only restored a random part of the posts (and actually about 27 again). The wordpress blog restored everything it backed up (all 84) and the posts were duplicated back to the August 3rd post (literary insults) and then the posts appeared OK (just one of each).

So what in the heck is it doing? And would you trust this to backup and restore your data? It confused me so much that I was tempted to run another test to see if I could figure out what was going on. But I’ve spent hours on this already and really don’t have the time to keep repeating the tests. Especially since I don’t get paid to do it!

And I didn’t even do any testing of the daily backups that it runs after you’ve run a full backup.

These are some other comments I had written to techrigy about the product when I first looked at it. I could add more to the list now but I won’t. I’ve spent too much time on this already.

1. it shows how many posts and comments but not how many pictures (and actually, somewhere along the line, it quit reporting comments).
2. it says it is free for now while in beta, but approx how muchwill it cost in the future? I could not find a price on any ofthe products you offer, they all said to contact sales which makes me think it must be expensive
3. it would be nice to be able to restore from and to a certain date, especially with the 50 post limitation in Blogger (and possibly in other blog engines)
4. it didn’t restore my tags/labels and I wonder if it would have if I was going blogger to blogger or any of the same type. (the answer was no after I tried it)
5. my social networking and bookmarks icons on bottom of each post copied over and works, but points to my original blog. I can understand why, but it does still create a problem.
6. when I click on content for my blog, I only see the last 10
   posts and there is no way to scroll down through my earlier
   posts.
7. it is confusing on the restore screen when it shows nothing in the box on the ‘what entries do you want to restore’ screen. It seems like there is nothing to restore. I figured out that Ineeded to ‘load blog entries’ but it would be much less confusing if they loaded when I entered that screen.
8. on the ‘what entries do you want to restore’ screen, it would be useful if there is a limit on a blog engine as to how many posts can be restored each day, to state that on the page and to give an error if more than that number of posts were selected.
9. the restore screen says NOTE: The major blog platforms do not support restoring comments. The comments we have backed up will be added to the end of the post’s text. But WordPress imports posts, comments, custom fields, pages, and categories from a WordPress export file and posts, comments, and users from a Blogger blog and posts and comments from a Movable Type or Typepad blog
10. the export tab lets me export my backup to a file on my hard drive. But what can I do with this file when I have it if I want to restore from it? will Wordpress import it? and if so, why not the comments as comments?
11. Since there is no name/password required to backup a blog, I believe you could essentially backup almost anyone’s blog (or certain posts) and restore them to your own blog. (I think you could do this with other backup tools also since they use the public RSS feeds)

There you have it. That was the results of my basic testing of this product. You decide if you’d want to trust your backups and restores to it. I can definitely say that based on my testing, I wouldn’t.

UPDATE 10/4/2007: I have since gotten a very good and thorough reply from Techrigy and I feel that their product will be very good when finished. I was more upset about people writing as though their product was fully functional now, than about the quality of their product when finished. For their responses to all my questions and concerns, see this post update of mine dated 10/04/2007.

~Susan Mellott

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One big problem with Google Blogger is that it doesn’t have a mechanism to back up your blog. So if something happens to Blogger and you lose your data, you do not have a backup. Or for a more likely scenario, if you want to move some or all of your posts to another Blogger blog, you can’t do it.

When I reviewed the various blog engines, I noted this problem and came up with a “hack” to backup your data. You can create a blog on Wordpress.com and use it to create a backup of your posts and comments. In Wordpress, you can go to “manage” and then “import” and it will let you import your blog posts, comments and users (but not categories) from Blogger (or LiveJournal, MovableType/Typepad or a saved Wordpress file). Then you can choose “export” and export your blog to a file that you can store on your hard drive or where you want to save it.

That works and works pretty easily and well but requires 2 blogs and may not be right for you. Well, there is also another option that isn’t quite as full-featured yet, but is easy and does a good job of backing up posts (and comments, but doesn’t have the ability to restore the comments to the post they belong to yet, they restore as a separate post).

It is Blogger Backup on CodePlex.

*PLEASE NOTE: The Blogger Backup utility uses (and has always used) your Public Feed to backup your posts.

If your feeds are off, then nothing can be backed up.
If your feeds are set to Summary, then only those Summary feeds will be backed up.

Additionally, if you have your feed redirected, like to feedburner (look in your settings/site feed to check), you need to turn off the redirect while you are backing up your blog. You can also look here to make sure you have your “Allow Blog Feed” set to “Full”.

Blogger Backup is easy to install and easy to use. It uses windows installer to install and is pretty self-explanatory to use. It doesn’t have great help and it doesn’t have a readme.txt but there is information on CodePlex and forums where you can post issues and questions.

After you have installed it, you should go to Microsoft Windows Updates and verify that you have the latest version and patches for .NET framework. If you select the “custom” button, it will scan your computer for updates and then give you a list of updates. Then click on Software (optional) on the left and look for Microsoft .NET framework. If you find anything, install it.

One note about the Windows Updates site, you have to be in Internet Explorer to use it. If you (like me) use another browser, you’ll have to go to IE to run the updates.

Then open the Blogger Backup and it asks you for your blog, or easier, you can give it your Blogger name/id and password and it will search for all your Blogger blogs for you.

To run a backup, you can choose to create 1 file with all your posts, or to create separate files for each post and comment, which lets you pick which posts to restore. You can choose whether or not to back up comments (this is unchecked so be sure to check it if you want your comments) and you can pick all posts or a number of posts to save or only new posts since a certain date. Here is what it looks like after you have run a backup (backing up each post individually). Click on the picture for a bigger view.

It puts these in My Documents\Blogger Backup\”your blog name”. Here is what the list of post backup files looks like in that directory.

When you click on Restore, you see a screen that looks like this one below. It is blank until you add some posts (as I have). It shows you the window above so you can pick the post(s) you want to restore.

In the larger view (click on pic) you will notice that the second line in my list of posts to restore looks different. It is actually a comment. But it thinks it is a post. I’m sure they are planning to fix that so it will restore comments correctly instead of as a post.

Note that only 50 blog posts can be restored each day due to a limit in Blogger.

When you click on OK, it restores the selected posts.

NOTE: you can backup posts from one blog and restore it to another. I have 2 blogger blogs. I backed up both blogs. Then I did a restore on one of the blogs but chose the subdirectory containing the posts from my other blog. They restored fine to the new blog.

This is a handy little tool and will become handier as it is developed. It is considered to be beta, so they are still working on it and adding features and functionality.

It doesn’t backup/restore comments properly yet and it doesn’t backup/restore any videos or pictures or other unusual items in a post. It doesn’t backup/restore tags and I doubt that it restores links either. And you have to have your full feeds turned on. I’m not sure if this would work if you didn’t have them turned on before. It may only restore back to when the feed was turned on, although I am not sure.

But it is easy to use and allows selective restores and backups of your blog. If you use Google Blogger and don’t backup your blog, this is a good way to get a basic backup. If you ever want to move blogs or lose posts, you will be glad you used it.

UPDATE: Greg (the author of Blogger Backup) is currently working on many new enhancements. It is a labor of love for him and he is doing a great job.

In response to a comment I posted on CodePlex, he says: “I plan on adding both a “comment only” (restoring comments to an existing post and Post & Comment (the post and its commnets) restore capability in the future. And the feed redirect issue is fixed in the version I’m currently working on… ”

and I asked about possibly enhancing the help and he replied that it is changing so fast that it is hard to keep any help files up-to-date but said “What I’ll do is add a couple simple pages to this site, one for requirements & installation notes and one for basic usage. That will be pretty easy and a good starting point… I’ll hack those out this weekend or so (depends on work… I’m currently stuck in a work cycle from hell and haven’t had much “spare time” to work on “my” stuff)”

Thanks, Greg, you are doing great work and are really helping a lot of people with your program.

~Susan Mellott

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