Many people underestimate the importance of backing up all of your online works. This was recently proven by a situation at journalspace.com. An employee of the company who hosted journal space overwrote their raided drives and wiped out every journal entry on the website, and the website. Keep in mind, this wasn't the fault of Journal Space, this was done by an employee at the company Journal Space had hired to host their website. They had no secondary back ups in place, and thus lost everything from their website. Some members have been able to recover some of their work from Google cache, but usually not all.
This is why backing up all data stored on the web is essential. You should always keep a copy on your computer and a secondary location. I personally back my 500+ poems and my girlfriend's 800+ poems once weekly. We would be devastated if we lost it all.
Below I will run through the actions you need to take in order to be backed up.
#1. Choose your backup application.
Most people have Microsoft Office and therefore Microsoft word. If you do, open a new Microsoft Word document and proceed to step 2.
If you don't have Microsoft Office, you will need to use a different office suite or writing application. I personally prefer OpenOffice. It is a free open source program that rivals Microsoft Office. You can get it by going to www.openoffice.org and downloading the latest version. Once it is downloaded and installed, open a new Open Office Writer document and proceed to step 2.
#2. Find your poems.
Open a new Internet window. Go to www.allpoetry.com and log in. At the top of the page, go to "My Account" and select "My Account" from the drop down menu. Once on your account page, click "Export your work into your word processor" on the right side beneath "Publish your poetry". This will open a page with all of your poetry, wait while it loads (may take a few minutes) and don't proceed until it is done loading.
Once your page has stopped loading, click anywhere on the page and either right click and select select all, or hold the control key and press A. Next, right click and choose copy, or hold Control and hit your C key. Once you have done this, click on your new Office or Word document and click on the empty page. Now either select "Paste" from the "Edit" option or hold your Control key and press the V key.
You should see all your poetry paste into your new document. To verify this, look at the total number of pages in your new document; there should be the same or more pages than poems you have. Once you are sure you have all your poems copied, proceed to step 3.
#3. Save your poems.
In the Document you just created, click "File" in the top left corner then choose "Save As" form the drop down menu. By default, it will more than likely save your backup into "My Documents". If you want to save somewhere else, now is the time to change it. Once you have picked where you want to save, you will need to enter a file name for your backup. I would suggest using your user name, the site name, and the date. For example, my backup from this morning is named "LokiAP01042009".
Type in your desired name, then click the "Save" button. Your poetry is now backed up to your computer. If you want to back up more than just your poems, read on, if poetry is all you're worried about, then you are done. Please leave comments on this column if you found it helpful.
Saving other writings on AP.
There are a few other things you may want to save from AP. Such as journal entries, columns, and your Author's Page.
Saving these are a little more difficult than backing up your poetry, but it can be done.
#1 Open a new document like step 1 above.
#2 Open All Poetry and log in. Click "My Page" at the top of the screen.
For backing up your columns, scroll down to just below your trophies. You should see a list of your number of poems, contests, and columns. Click on columns and click on the first one you want to save. Once it's open, highlight from your column title to the last line. Once it is highlighted, either right click on it and choose select all, or simply hold the Control key and press C. Now go to your new document and select Paste from the edit menu or hold Control and press V. Repeat for each column. This procedure should be the same for columns.
To back up your Author's Page, click "My Page" at the top then highlight everything from below your name to right above "Last seen".
Copy it and paste it following the same procedure as above. This should get the main body of your Author's page unless you have done HTML or quite a bit of customization.
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Make sure to back up your work often. Bookmark this column if you don't think you will remember how to back it up.
Please leave a comment if you found this comment helpful.
-Loki
#3 Save just like in step 3 above, but if you saved your poems already, you will need to choose a new name for your new save. For example, if i were backing up my columns, I would name my file "LokiAPC01042009". The C after AP stands for columns. Or you could just name it "Columns01042009".
How to thoroughly backup your writings here on AP and keep a copy on your computer.
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