Ever felt like you ought to be doing backups of your blog, but you forget, or you can’t be bothered, or you put it off until tomorrow? Well, here’s an easy way to do it automatically. Please note, I didn’t find this myself, I found it on this random web-page, but the instructions were a little vague. Although there are some handy screenshots, if my instructions are too vague.

I’m writing this assuming you have an IJ, but it works equally well with wordpress or blogger or anything else that provides a feed of the content.

First, you will need a gmail account. I created one especially for this purpose, but you don’t have to. Actually other emails will also work but gmail’s labelling feature plus its nearly unlimited storage make it the best choice for this purpose. You will also need to sign up for feedburner, but if you haven’t already don’t worry, you can do that as part of the following steps.

1) Log into your gmail and create a Label for your blog. It can be your IJ username,. or anything else you like, but you’ll need to remember it for later. (Labels are in the left-hand sidebar, in the green box, near the bottom). Next, click on Filters and then Create New Filter. In the “To” box, type yourgmailname+label@gmail.com Obviously substituting here your own gmail name, and the label name that you just created. The plus sign is very important. Click Next Step. Then tick the “Apply the Label” tickybox and pick your label from the list.

2) Go to feedburner. On the main page there’s a text box to paste a feed url. Paste http://www.insanejournal.com/users/exampleusername/data/rss/ in here (put in your own username) and click Next.

3) If you don’t already have a feedburner account, here’s where you create one. Check the title of the blog is ok, and fill in a username, password and valid email (you’ll need to validate the email before you proceed but it’s very quick). If you have one already, log in. Either way, click the Activate button to activate the feed.

4) The next steps deal with creating stats for the feed, you can either do so or skip it. After that you’ll end up at the feed management page with some tabs across the top: Analyze, Optimize, Publicize, Monetize and Troubleshootize. Click Publicize.

5) Down the sidebar on the left are several options. Click “Email Subscriptions” (the 4th one)

6) On the next page, scroll about halfway down and click the link Preview Subscription Link. A popup window will appear. If it doesn’t, check your browser isn’t disabling popups and allow ones from feedburner.com.

7) In the box in the popup, type yourgmailname+label@gmail.com; Fill in the captcha, click the button and wait for the verification email in your gmail. (Here you can check it’s working: the verification email should be labelled too).

8) You can repeat all the above process for as many blogs as you wish, using the same feedburner and gmail accounts, just using different labels on the gmail address.

Now, whenever you post an entry to your blog(s) you’ll automatically receive an email with the content of the blog, and it will be labelled with the blog name.