How to Backup Your Blogger Template

I originally had this section within another post but felt it warranted a separate post for anyone's reference. It is always a good practice to backup your templates just in case something goes awry. Before you do any modifications to a Blogger template be sure to either practice these changes in a test blog or backup your template to disk before starting. This is critical!! Modifying a template is prone to errors and may disable your blog. If you haven't done this before it is very easy. Please note - this only backs-up your template, not your posts! Posts are exported in the Settings/Other/Export Blog section. See how to Backup your full blog site and content in this post.

Backing Up Your Blogger Template

Just go into the Blogger main menu for your specific blog and choose the 'Template' option. Up in the far right corner is the 'Backup/Restore' option for your template. Just click on that to start the backup process:

A pop-up dialog will appear with the Backup / Restore options with the button to 'Download full template' like this:

The template is just an XML file - you'll see a long, odd name for it when you press the button such as this one:

Just choose a convenient location on your hard drive by selecting 'Save File' so that you can retrieve it later if necessary.

Restoring Your Blogger Template

If you want to restore a template, just follow the same steps but choose the 'Browse' option in the window below to find your Blogger template XML file:

The file on the disk should look something like this:

You can see that I've selected it - just double-click the file to get it into the file box:

Hit the 'Upload' button to restore - you should be good to go! Remember, you can use the Restore option to import templates as well - more on that in future posts.