How do I look at a blog I backed up?

  • Unknown's avatar
    bobtailcat · Member ·

    A few years ago, I created a blog on WordPress.com. I stopped working on it, and I did a ‘backup’. I can’t remember exactly how I did the ‘backup’ but I followed the instructions given in WordPress on how to do a backup.

    I restarted working on the blog but I am missing some pictures from the blog. These photos were linked from a Photobucket account that is no longer active.

    I retrieved the file that I had backed up. It is named “wordpress.2008-11-01.xml”.

    I am using a Mac computer and have an OS that is 10.6.4. I also use mainly Opera and Firefox web browsers. When I clicked on the file, it asked me what application I wanted to open it with. I tried first OpenOffice.org but that didn’t work out – there weren’t any pictures showing.

    I then tried Opera. However, it took too long and it eventually crashed the browser.

    The file is about 3.9 MB.

    Questions:

    1) How do I open it?
    2) Will it have the pictures that are missing?
    3) How do I open it and look at it without it replacing my current blog? I don’t want to change the blog that I am working on now – I don’t want to replace it with the backup – I simply want to try and get the missing pictures back.

    Thanks.

  • Unknown's avatar
    auxclass · Member ·

    you need to make a separate new empty blog – you can do that on your PC if you want or make a new 2nd test / demo / experimental blog here on WordPress.com then Import your backup file into the new blog and see if the pictures come with the backup – I am not familiar enough with the file structure to know if your pictures are embedded in your xml file – but the instructions I just gave are the only way I now of to really see the contents of the backup file – then once you have the imported file into your new blog you can just set the new blog to private (in case you want to experiment or try new things then you will have a test bed.

  • Unknown's avatar
    1tess · Moderator Emeritus ·

    @bobtailcat,

    If the pictures were linked to files on Photobucket and not uploaded directly to your WordPress library, then they won’t be in your wml backup.

    If the photos are in your media library, and you are using the same (old) blog, they should still appear on your old posts.

  • Unknown's avatar
    1tess · Moderator Emeritus ·

    You could open your xml file with TextEdit and do a command-find for .jpeg to check what sort of links you exported.

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