Spontaneous Derivation

This is just SO very fitting.

Backing up a blog can be a difficult business. Yet this is one of the most important issues for any blog–professional, amateur, or personal.

Taking care of this necessary business as cleanly as possible is important:

• Backups should be easy to make, otherwise you’ll be less inclined to spend the effort.
• Backups should be automated, otherwise you won’t be backing up regularly and might even forget.
• Backups should be stored somewhere other than where your blog is hosted, otherwise whatever disaster befalls your primary data will also likely happen to your backups. Self-hosting bloggers, this means you.
• Backups should be easily restorable.

For almost any blog, whether self-hosted or not, setting up your backup procedure is not part and parcel of your blogging software. (It’s worse in the case of non-self-hosted blogs.) And even for someone like me, who’s not inexperienced when it comes to getting nightly archives of a database running and kicked over to Amazon S3 automatically, creating a procedure that follows all of the above is extremely difficult and time-consuming. Gods help you if it breaks and you don’t notice, too.

With these concerns in mind, I spent quite a long time searching for blog backup solutions. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that someone had actually decided to try to make a business of making something as difficult as backups easy: