COMPUTER SECURITY: I TAKE A FEW GIANT STEPS

No new photos today, no travel or sightseeing stories, no updates on Odel's treatment (except that today will be his 5th, and he is currently on the golf course) or my (lack of) progress on Weight Watchers. This post is all about slogging through computer and blog backups, so most of you can quit reading right here!

Semi-True Tales now includes 348 posts, covering almost 2 years of travel - plus links to our blog of campsite reviews, We Called It Home (currently 51 reviews), recipes and other blogs and websites. How would I feel if this was lost, hacked, hijacked or simply disappeared? Very distressed!

That happened recently to a blog I read from time to time, Millionaire Mommy Next Door. As the Millionaire Mommy said, “The unthinkable happened. My entire Google account was disabled. This means my blog, my email account, my calendar… the whole shebang… are gone. I have followed all of the available instructions, filled out all of the forms… and all I get back from Google is this automated message: “Thank you for your report. The account in question is disabled, and we can’t provide you with access to it.”

Unlike my hobby blog, Millionaire Mommy Next Door was a money-maker (some of which is used to fund microloans on Kiva) , and this was a huge blow to her. For me, it was a nudge to think about how to back up our blogs.

A few days later, my “low-priority” email account on Yahoo was hacked. The entire contact list was stolen, totally wiped clean, and the addresses were used to send what appeared to be a harmless but annoying spam message. This Yahoo account is the one I use for online ordering, newsletter descriptions, messages from online bulletin boards… the stuff I don’t worry much about if something goes awry. However, the fact that something DID go awry, along with the experience of the Millionaire Mommy, set me firmly on the path of improving computer security.

But how???

Next morning, I received the Geeks on Tour newsletter in my Yahoo mailbox. The Geeks are a couple of full-timing computer nerds who make their living teaching computer classes, creating and maintaining websites, and generally helping people like me improve our computer knowledge and skills. Naturally, much of their information requires a paid subscription, but each month, they feature a free video on a new topic. Their current free video is “Duplicating a Blogger Blog to WordPress” - EXACTLY what I needed.

So as not to invite disaster by ignoring all these “nudges”, I recently spent several hours making substantial changes to our computer security and backups, especially for our blogs. If you have been pondering any of these moves, you might be interested in what I did. Read on.

IN CASE OF EMERGENCY: NEW ONLINE ACCOUNTS

First, following Millionaire Mommy's advice, I learned to set up a new Google account, a backup to our existing account. I used this blog site for instruction on what to do.

I gave it “administrative rights” to Semi-True Tales and We Called It Home. If our primary Google account has any problems, I can use this new backup account to post to and edit both blogs.

A copy of every email sent to our primary Gmail (Google) account now goes automatically to the Gmail inbox of the new backup account (the setup for this was simple). If we lose access to our primary account, we can switch to the new backup account without losing our current email conversations.

I exported a copy of our Gmail Contacts, saving all the information in a file on our laptop, to be backed up to our external hard drive monthly - saved in the event that we need to reload these addresses in the future.

Then I went to work backing up the blogs. Interested? Keep reading...

A "SHADOW" BLOG ON WORDPRESS.COM

Over many months of blogging, I have made many, many changes to our original “default” blog template - changing colors and fonts, adding “widgets” and short strings of computer-speak to tweak the templates to my taste. I don’t want to lose those customizations, so I saved my blog templates to a file on our laptop. Blogger makes this easy: on the Layout tab of a Blogger blog, pick Edit HTML and use Backup/Restore Template. This saved file will be backed up to our external hard drive monthly.

Next, I used the Geeks On Tour video instructions to set up a WordPress.com account (Wordpress is another online blogging site), to create “backup” blogs, and to copy all my blog posts to the new WordPress blogs. Here is what Semi-True Tales looks like on Wordpress, using one of their standard formats (called "themes"). Someday, when I have the time and interest, I'll poke around the Wordpress site and customize these blogs - but for now, backing up my Blogger posts is my only priority.

The Geeks video was very clear, and I was able to set up the account, create the two new blogs, and copy all the blog posts safely to these new backup blogs in one evening (you need to have reliable, high-speed internet access to do this without frustration). I’ll copy new posts to the backup blogs monthly, or weekly when we are on the road and posting frequently. If I ever lose access to our Blogger blogs, I’ll be able to switch easily to the Wordpress blogs.

I would not have known how to do this if not for the Geeks. If you want to learn how to do this, do it SOON. The video is currently available for free viewing on the Geeks website, but the free video changes regularly.

I had only one task remaining (next post)...