Haven't started a blog yet, but

I haven't started posting to a blog yet, but I do have a fair amount of text and photos accumulated for one.  It's all in a number of would-be entries made in a series of files saved in a folder on one of my hard drives.  They get backed up along with my other data files, such as photos, on a regular basis.  I keep separate copies of the photos that are embedded in those files as well.

Since I use LibreOffice primarily on my desktop and Microsoft Office 2013 on my portable for writing while on the go, the documents are standard Word-compatible files.  I find it easier to put together long messages in either office suite than in a forum's relatively limited comment block.  Just my opinion there, but composing stuff off-line and then copying and pasting finished chunks into the comment block is quicker for me.

Without an established blog, I don't know if there is a quick way to download the entire thing, but at least one way would be to open up each blog topic and then copy-and-paste the topics into a document file on your own computer.  I imagine it might be tedious, but spread over a number of days it could give you a complete backup.

If there is an automated way, I'm looking forward to hear about it.

Janet N.
 

The wayback machine

Back up what you value.

Remember when Photobucket broke the internet?  Their hair-brained extortion scheme went over about as well as the black plague.

In the real world, we have property rights and ownership of our intellectual property. If you were renting a parking space near work and the owners of that lot decided to hold your car for ransom, that would be a felony.  If you made a beautiful painting and the gallery you consign with decided to make a bunch of prints without your consent, that would be a felony.

But that's the real world.  In the digital world, all of our files are 1's and 0's.  While still illegal to steal people's stuff, prosecuting and recovering stolen digital property is much more difficult.  There's also a little quirk in the law.  Most sites that host text and images own those copies.  That's how Photobucket got away with twisting everyone's arm for cash. Their terms of service made it clear that images on the Photobucket site were theirs and not their customers. Photobucket therefore dictates how the images on their site are used and can hold them hostage if they want.

Even worse, that's pretty much how the whole internet works.

Everything that exists is temporary, including our own creations. Backing up files was a problem before the internet too.  Shop fires destroyed many, many designs and inventions.  Ansel Adams and Edward Weston both had fires in their darkroom.  Hundreds of iconic images that defined America during the depression, gone in an evening.  In other words, there is no such thing as permanent storage or absolutely safe storage.

The only reliable way to keep your files safe is to be your own insurance.  Save physical and digital copies in several places.  One TB will hold 75 million pages of text.  It can also hold a 500,000 photos or 500 hours of video depending on the resolution.

If you want to save your train blog, that's the advice I give.  Backup to multiple places, in multiple mediums, as often as you can.

"Ransomed" Files

If the ONLY copy you had of your photos is the one on Photobucket or any similar hosting site, that's on you. Online photo sites are not for storing and archiving your important original files, they're purely for sharing with others.

While the way they changed their terms was not handled very well (to put it mildly) web hosting costs money so they're certainly entitled to charge for their SERVICE of hosting and sharing your images publicly.

Only an idiot would have deleted all their original images from their own computer after uploading to a sharing site.

By using their service, you AGREE to those terms of service, providing that consent to "make a bunch of prints".

Saving posts

One way to back up posts from MRH is to go one post at a time, select the text and images in the post, copy, and paste them into something that will preserve the formatting and appearance.  Possibly a word document, possibly a google document, possibly an email to yourself.  It’s more time consuming than printing to a PDF, but what you end up with is more easily editable - if it’s your own blog content your backing up, if it should ever come to pass that MRH goes offline for good (shudder at the thought), you might want to be able to easily edit it to repost on some other blog host.

Everything I post in my blog

Everything I post in my blog get's copied to my website. All pictures are hosted on my own server. Everything is backed up on 2 physical machines and another copy ends up on a cloud server. I might be overdoing it a bit but I will never loose any of it.

Copy and Paste

I think I'll just start doing the old copy and paste to Microsoft Word now. I haven't written that much on MRH website compared to others. It shouldn't take too long to back up my old stuff.

I get the feeling

I get the feeling, Chris, that you're making some kind of counterargument.  Unfortunately, I don't know what that counterargument is.  From what I can tell, we're making the exact same arguments.  That is, back up important files and don't trust any company with your property.

PB

It sounded like you were making a version of the complaint that photobucket stole your files and held them hostage and not letting you recover them. It seemed that some people were making this very real argument because they didn't actually keep their own copies after uploading... and to them I say it's your own darn fault.

Okay, now I see

Thankfully, I never used Photobucket or a similar image sharing service.

The problem is that the new owners decided that the service which was being offered wasn't enough profit for their liking.  Now, it's all well and good that a company make changes which best suit them, but the owners of the business decided to introduce a $400 fee without telling any of their customers. Most people have copies of their photos elsewhere, but the two categories of people which were effected the most were bloggers/online businesses and people with no copies of their family photos anywhere.

For bloggers and business owners, once all those image links are gone there is no web traffic.  Even if people paid the $400 and got their images restored, the audience was already gone and not coming back.

And there are a lot of people with no computer and no permanent storage.  I know plenty of people with just a smart phone.  Well, those things don't hold a lot of photos and they get lost, stolen, broken, or replaced every two years. For those people, Photobucket's tactic WAS ransom.

Both of these demographics were ignorant on how the internet works. But when people are fed a bunch of lies, it's easy to screw them over.

You can call people who screw up idiots all you want, but the simple fact is everyone is an idiot most of the time, including you and me.  I mean no disrespect when making such a remark, but the amount of things we don't know heavily outweigh the things we do know and it's incredibly easy to screw over anyone.

The moral of the story is you can only trust yourself to take care of your own documents, images, and other files.  While I highly doubt MRH would resort to that kind of a ruthless tactic, it's entirely possible that this website crashes someday and everything that wasn't backed up gets lost.