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.
