How to export everything from Blogger

So, I just quickly tested the export functionality of Blogger. I am quite impressed, I am not going to lie. I shall talk to you about it.

The whole Blog is exported in a single YML file. By quickly scrolling through it, I concluded that this file contains info regarding the theme and the settings at the top, and all the Posts at the bottom enlisted in chronological order (there is a timestamp for literally everything). It would make sense if ALL the pieces of info regarding the theme are saved and if Archived Posts ("old enough" Posts) are placed in the backup file, yet I did not personally test that.

 To open a YML file you can use:

  • a simple text editor (e.g. Notepad for Windows, TextEdit for Mac or Visual Studio Code);
  • a browser (e.g. Firefox worked for me);
  • Excel;
  • an XML viewer.

A long XML file in a crude text editor can is quite harsh to analyse though. Personally, I will be using Firefox to check the backups. I thank this wikiHow link for being a somewhat valuable source.

What about the videos and photos embedded in a Post? Well, obviously, the XML file contains ONLY the links to a video or photo somewhere else on the Internet, otherwise this text-like file would weigh a TON even with a couple of compressed videos and photos.

Photos and videos hosted somewhere else (e.g. Imgur and Youtube) can be directly embedded using such link. But videos and photos which are first uploaded from one's computer are placed in a "Blogger cloud" of sort before being linked inside a Post.

From your Blogger, you can go to Settings -> Manage Your Blog -> Export / Backup blog to download all your blog as an XML file. In the same section, right next to Backup blog, you can also click on "Manage videos" and "Manage media" to access and download all of your images and videos.

Apparently, you can upload an infinite number of pieces of media to Blogger itself, with the caveat that

<< For size, Blogger will resize your photos to 2048 pixels on the longest side. If you need to host a bigger version, you will have to do it on Photos. There's a limit of 15 minutes on video, and I think there is also a limit on the size of a video file but I cannot tell you what it is. >>

Source: this Blogger Help link.

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