Like many, many, many others, I’ve been affected by Bloglines’ recent problems – where not only are new feed items not showing up, but older “bookmarked” or in Bloglines terms, “Kept New” items have also disappeared.

It would be an understatement to say that it has affected my blogging, but the only party to blame is myself. And to think I once berated WordPress users for not backing up their blogs.

Now that I’ve learnt my lesson, I’ve started backing up, or at least, keeping a proper alternative to the various web services I use in the process of blogging. I’m sure many of you use the same sort of web-based tools, so hopefully this write-up will be of help.

Your Online Feed Reader

While this is surely one of the most important tools for a blogger, it is one of the hardest (if possible at all) to completely backup. Yes, this is where bloggers using desktop-based feed readers (like NetNewsWire and FeedDemon) will snicker at those using web-based feed readers, e.g. Bloglines, My Yahoo!, etc. Why? Because while you can easily keep a backup of the feeds you’ve subscribed to (through .opml exporting), most web-based feed readers don’t allow you to backup the items you’ve tagged to keep.

The only exception I know for Windows users is Newsgator’s complete synchronization with FeedDemon, where stuff you’ve tagged on the web-based Newsgator can be synchronized automatically with the desktop-based FeedDemon – even tagged items. But I don’t see myself using any other web-based reader except Bloglines in the near future, so that’s a no-go. So, if you’re like me, the best fail-safe you have is to keep a .opml list of the feeds you’ve subscribed to at all times, or synchronize your feed list with another web service or desktop feed reader regularly.

Your Social Bookmarks

My knowledge on this extends only to del.icio.us and Diigo, so if you’re using something else, I’m afraid you’ll have to look elsewhere. Sorry. Anyway, for del.icio.us users there’s a diverse range of ways to backup your bookmarks – 11 to be exact. My personal preference is the simple HTML Export integrated within del.icio.us. Just login to your del.icio.us account, click Settings and then, click Export. Simple and effective enough, but you’ll have to look at some of the other ways available if you want a more automated solution.

For Diigo users, there’s really only one method at the moment, and it’s pretty much the same as del.icio.us’ HTML Export. Just go to My Tools, then Export Bookmarks. However, your annotations and sticky notes aren’t backed up this way. Sheesh. The only alternative is to use the Extract Highlight and Blog This tools to do a pseudo-export, but… it’s cumbersome.

Your Images

This part applies primarily to those who use photo sharing services like Flickr since bloggers who host images on their own servers can just easily download a set onto their own PCs. Again, I’m only familiar with Flickr, so the following will only apply to it. What I suggest is to download the Flickr Backup utility which allows you to download all the photos you’ve uploaded to Flickr back into your local hard drive. It’s even OS independent since it’s written in Java.

Conclusion

So, that’s about it for me. There are a few other things I’ve made sure to backup, such as my to-do lists, but since not everyone uses them, I’ve kept them out of today’s discussion.

What about you? Do you already keep backups, and if so, of what web services?

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