By Jonathan Plutchok

Hello again to my loyal Tool Bar & Grill patrons, and welcome to the many new visitors who stopped in for a bite this week. I hope you all are enjoying the tasty snacks of useful and time-saving utilities and helpful Web sites that I serve up every week. Today’s special: a great backup service for your blog (and mine).

If you write a blog or Web site, you appreciate the hard work that goes into it. Every thought is precious, every word a jewel (especially mine, of course). What a loss to the world it would be, if some technical glitch or human error wiped your blog, or mine, off its server!

Fear not, because BlogBackupOnline has come to your rescue. Set up an account at the Web site – http://www.blogbackuponline.com – and specify the location of your blog. BlogBackupOnline runs a full backup of your entire blog to their own server; after that, it backs up new material daily. The interface is clear, simple, and friendly.

If your blog ever goes kablooey and your blog service provider loses its backup, you can restore it from BlogBackupOnline in a few simple steps. You also can use BlogBackupOnline to transfer your blog to another platform, or to export it in RSS format.

When I restored some posts, it brought them back perfectly, including the screen captures. However, while BlogBackupOnline says it can restore comments as text at the end of the blog post, it failed to restore the comments on my blog.

BlogBackupOnline claims to support most major blogging platforms, including Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, Friendster, LiveJournal, Serendipity, Windows Live Space, Movable Type, Terapad, and Vox.

BlogBackupOnline says its service is free while in beta (that is, during testing before general release), and each free account gets 50 MB of storage. (To put that in perspective, the 31 previous posts in this blog occupy 436 KB, including graphics – less than 1% of my 50 MB.)

So if you blog, back up your valuable contributions to humankind now, easily and for free. Let’s hope BlogBackupOnline stays in beta forever!

As always, I hope your visit to the Tool Bar & Grill has been both satisfying and nutritious. You can’t beat the price, anyway. I only ask that next time, you bring your friends. You can comment by writing to . See you here next week!

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