God, save my blog

There can be nothing worse than to login to Blogger one day and find you blogger blog gone, corrupted or deleted forever due to any unforseen error. Back up is very important. Here is a simple way to keep your Blogger blog safe and backed up.

Blogger does not have an export or download function. However, you can use the following instructions to create a single file with all your posts which you may publish and then copy to your own computer for use as desired. Note: If you intend to continue using your blog, please save a copy of your existing template in a file on your computer as you will need to have it at hand after this process is completed.

1. Log into your Blogger account, then switch into template-editing mode.
2. Make a copy of your current template; you will be replacing your Blogger template with the single page template in Step 3, but you probably don't want to lose your original template.
3. Replace your Blogger template with the following (note: you must remove the indentation from the following lines when pasting into your Blogger template):
< Blogger>
AUTHOR: < $BlogItemAuthor$>
DATE: < $BlogItemDateTime$>
-----
BODY:
< $BlogItemBody$>
--------
< /Blogger>
Optional: If you are using our commenting system, you can choose to export comments along with the posts. If you want to do this, add the following code to your template, just above the tag:
< BlogItemCommentsEnabled>
< BlogItemComments>
COMMENT-AUTHOR:<$BlogCommentAuthor$>
COMMENT-DATE:<$BlogCommentDateTime$>
COMMENT-BODY:<$BlogCommentBody$>
--------
< /BlogItemComments>
< /BlogItemCommentsEnabled>
4. In Settings | Publishing change your Blog Filename to a different filename; this will prevent you from overwriting your main index file. Make a note of your current Blog Filename so you can restore the setting after finishing. [Note: This only applies to users publishing via FTP. Free BlogSpot users will need to overwrite their existing blog page, but it will be replaced as soon as the blog is republished with the original template.]
5. In Settings | Formatting, set your blog to display all of your posts on the main index page. There is no explicit setting for this; instead, you should change the number of days displayed on your front page (Show N days' posts on main page) higher than the number of days that you have been blogging.
6. In Settings | Formatting set Date/Time Format to the format MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS AM|PM. (Note: the format will not look like this in the menu; instead it will be the current time, formatted.) Make a note of your current setting so you can restore it after finishing.
7. Also in Settings | Formatting set Convert Line Breaks to No.
8. In Settings | Archiving, set Archive Frequency to No Archive. This will prevent your archives from being overwritten with the new template.
9. Republish your blog; you will end up with a single file with all of your posts, formatted using the above template, at the location specified in your Settings. Open this file in your web browser and save the file to your local hard drive.
10. Restore the previous settings (Blog filename, archive frequency, timestamp, etc.) in your blog and replace the temporary template with your saved copy. Publish the blog and view the page to check that everything is correct.