During scheduled maintenance on Wednesday 11th May 2011, Blogger experienced some data corruption that impacted Blogger's behaviour. This resulted in all blog owners who use the blogging platform unable to publish for over 20 hours.
According to Eddie Kessler, Tech Lead/Manager on a recent post on Blogger Buzz, bloggers and readers may have experienced a variety of anomalies including intermittent outages, disappearing posts, and arriving at unintended blogs or error pages. A small subset of Blogger users (they estimate 0.16%) may have encountered additional problems specific to their accounts.
To resolve the problem and to get the service back to normal, Blogger returned their system to a pre-maintenance state on Thursday 12th (temporary removing all posts/comments since 7:37am PT Wednesday 11th May) and placed the service in read-only mode while they worked on restoring all content. This is the main reason why blog owners were unable to publish for over 20 hours.
Although now finally back online and bloggers being able to publish new content, Blogger are still hard at work restoring posts and comments which could take some time. Hopefully, all these posts and comments can be retrieved as the added dilemma of losing data could in fact, seriously impact users confidence in the blogging platform. There have been reports that some bloggers have already moved their blogs to WordPress due to this outage.
Why You Should Regularly Backup Your Blog
Given this recent outage with Blogger and the disappearance of some bloggers posts and comments (although temporary), backing up your blog regularly is more important than ever. Like all sites/services on the internet, Blogger (even WordPress) isn't immune to problems, so you really need to get into the habit of backing up your blog, especially after each post and when you receive comments.
Full details on backing up your blog on Blogger (and WordPress) can be found on following post: Have You Backed Up Your Blog?
Please Note: When you do a backup of your blog on Blogger, all your blog comments (along with your blog posts) are automatically saved in the XML file that you download. These comments can be found near the bottom of the document which can be viewed using a standard text editor such as WordPad etc.
Don't forget to regularly backup your template as well, especially if you make changes to your blog design or page elements. Full details on how to do this on Blogger are on the above post.
On a personal note, I was quite lucky as the outage didn't effect me apart from missing comments on my last post...I do have these backed up though just in case Blogger cannot retrieve them.
How did the outage effect you? Please let me know.
Related Articles:
Have You Backed Up Your Blog?
As ever, if you want to stay up to date with the latest blog posts, don't forget to follow via Google Friend Connect (button on sidebar), on Facebook or subscribe to our feed at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/DereksHomeAndBusinessBlog
You can also follow me on Twitter @djones1509 and on Facebook at:
http://www.facebook.com/djones1509
http://www.facebook.com/DereksHomeandBusinessBlog
Safe blogging everyone!
According to Eddie Kessler, Tech Lead/Manager on a recent post on Blogger Buzz, bloggers and readers may have experienced a variety of anomalies including intermittent outages, disappearing posts, and arriving at unintended blogs or error pages. A small subset of Blogger users (they estimate 0.16%) may have encountered additional problems specific to their accounts.
To resolve the problem and to get the service back to normal, Blogger returned their system to a pre-maintenance state on Thursday 12th (temporary removing all posts/comments since 7:37am PT Wednesday 11th May) and placed the service in read-only mode while they worked on restoring all content. This is the main reason why blog owners were unable to publish for over 20 hours.
Although now finally back online and bloggers being able to publish new content, Blogger are still hard at work restoring posts and comments which could take some time. Hopefully, all these posts and comments can be retrieved as the added dilemma of losing data could in fact, seriously impact users confidence in the blogging platform. There have been reports that some bloggers have already moved their blogs to WordPress due to this outage.
Why You Should Regularly Backup Your Blog
Given this recent outage with Blogger and the disappearance of some bloggers posts and comments (although temporary), backing up your blog regularly is more important than ever. Like all sites/services on the internet, Blogger (even WordPress) isn't immune to problems, so you really need to get into the habit of backing up your blog, especially after each post and when you receive comments.
Full details on backing up your blog on Blogger (and WordPress) can be found on following post: Have You Backed Up Your Blog?
Please Note: When you do a backup of your blog on Blogger, all your blog comments (along with your blog posts) are automatically saved in the XML file that you download. These comments can be found near the bottom of the document which can be viewed using a standard text editor such as WordPad etc.
Don't forget to regularly backup your template as well, especially if you make changes to your blog design or page elements. Full details on how to do this on Blogger are on the above post.
On a personal note, I was quite lucky as the outage didn't effect me apart from missing comments on my last post...I do have these backed up though just in case Blogger cannot retrieve them.
How did the outage effect you? Please let me know.
Related Articles:
Have You Backed Up Your Blog?
As ever, if you want to stay up to date with the latest blog posts, don't forget to follow via Google Friend Connect (button on sidebar), on Facebook or subscribe to our feed at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/DereksHomeAndBusinessBlog
You can also follow me on Twitter @djones1509 and on Facebook at:
http://www.facebook.com/djones1509
http://www.facebook.com/DereksHomeandBusinessBlog
Safe blogging everyone!
Just wanted to say thank you for your informative posts on backing up blogs. I'm not technical at all and need all the help I can get, especially since the recent Blogger mess. They haven't yet restored important comments left on Thursday and I am pretty anxious about it. Can you tell me, does this back up include GFC together with comments as well? I'm just Exporting Blog now.
ReplyDeleteThanks again,
Kathryn Brown (Crystal Jigsaw)
Thanks for your nice info...
ReplyDeleteDerek, a huge THANK YOU for this valuable info. After the Blogger debacle I lost comments on my most recent post, but thank God that’s all (that I can see). Like Crystal Jigsaw said in the comments here, I’m not technical at all, and need every bit of help I can get. It’s great to know there’s a wonderful resource person out there like you.
ReplyDeleteBlessings,
~ Debra
Excellent info, especially for all we non technical folks.
ReplyDeleteIt's worth reading this post ..thanks for sharing !!
ReplyDeleteThank you for your wonderful comments...I'm so pleased that the information on backing up your blog has helped all of you!
ReplyDeleteLike you, I'm still waiting for the comments to be restored on my last post and it's NOW Monday :( Hopefully, ALL comments on all of your blogs will be restored soon by Blogger.
Like I mentioned in the post above, just make sure you back up your blog often, especially after each post and when you receive comments. If anything does go wrong again with Blogger, at least you’ll have backups.
Kathryn - When you do a backup on Blogger, the file that you download will include ALL of your posts and comments.
Thanks again for your wonderful comments and don't forget, backup often :)
Derek
Derek as usual your my go to blog for all of this stuff lol. Thanks for all your help
ReplyDeletehttp://jpweddingphotograpy.blogspot.com/2011/05/scorpion-and-frog.html
Contrary to popular thought, migrating from Blogger to WordPress is *not* the answer. I speak as someone who uses both free platforms (and wrote a review about same found here >>
ReplyDeletehttp://tinyurl.com/BattleOftheFreeBlogs)
While WP has not disappeared anyone's content, it has, however, experienced a fair amount of distributed denial of service attacks that have been pretty deadly. Although the content did not go bye-bye, the end result of the DDoS was to prevent access for a 24 hour period.
Any any blogger jumping over to WP because s/he is disgruntled about the latest debacle is at best, misguided and at worst, uninformed. The solution is to backup your blog, not jump ship over every little outage. Electronic things can and do fail a lot more often than we want to admit to ourselves, but it's just the nature of the beast. Anything that runs on a computer can and will fail eventually.
That's excellent advice Peyton...this is the reason why I made no suggestion of moving to WordPress and included the statement "Like all sites/services on the internet, Blogger (even WordPress) isn't immune to problems". My aim was to enlighten bloggers to backup and to backup often as these kind of situations can happen.
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing your thought on this.
Derek
Well Derek, I lost 2 posts but blame my laziness for not saving a copy elsewhere! Anyway, thanks to your article, saved a fresh copy of my blog! keep blogging.
ReplyDeletehttp://twitter.com/websnacker
Hi Web Snacker,
ReplyDeleteIf you're posts are still missing, try checking your drafts (you may need to republish them). Failing this, contact Blogger using the following form:
https://spreadsheets0.google.com/a/google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dHA1MF9CcVdkX0o1S2Fab0RKT0ZyV1E6MQ
Hope this helps.
Derek