My earlier post on the outbound mail woes I’ve had was delayed a couple of hours because I had to completely rebuild my blog site. Completely. Reinstalling the blog software and everything. Fortunately, Movable Type has a nice little import/export feature that I was able to use to back up (export) my blog contents to a text file before I blew away the installation and started over. And, after I got Movable Type reinstalled and reconfigured, I was able to restore (import) my blog posts in one step and it was as if the site never had a hiccup.

But it got me to thinking about my web space provider and what type of backups they provide for the site. In this case, since this is dynamic content generated by Movable Type and not by Dreamweaver, I don’t have a local set of files I could re-upload in case of server drive failure. so I’m off to explore the backup/restore options my web host provides should there be a catastrophic error someday. In the meantime, I’m doing an export of my blog contents before every blog post for the time being, just to make sure.