Friday, July 26, 2013

Do you back up your RSS feeds list?

Before the demise of Google Reader I moved over to The Old Reader and I have been very happy with that product.

Earlier this week I became concerned when The Old Reader went down and stayed that way for a few days. It is now up and running again. During this time they honestly reported about their problems and kept users informed via their blog.

They had  experienced some disastrous hardware issue when migrating to new servers. While I was fairly sure that the people behind The Old Reader would get things going again I was concerned until the site was finally online again.

What if I lost my list of feeds?

My collection of feeds is dynamic, it changes constantly as I add and delete from the list. If necessary I could import an old .opml file into another product but the last one I have is when I moved from Google and this is very out of date. I could not rely on my poor old memory to reconstruct the list.

So now I have added another task to my backup regime. I will regularly export an .opml file of my RSS subscriptions from The Old Reader so that if some further drama occurs I will have a reasonably accurate file of those subscriptions. The Old Reader issue this week was a real wakeup call for me.

Do you regularly backup your RSS subscriptions?


6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I send myself an email with the RSS feed in the subject.
Then I list the feeds I want to keep track of.
Eventually I add all the emails together and have a "just in case" list.

Kristin said...

I was happily using Old Reader until that happened to me this week too. I had not kept a file of my feeds but was able to reconstruct them using the "My Favorite Blogs" list on my blog and the list on Sepia Saturday and going to links on my favorite blogs. I opened an acct. on Feedly and have been using that. Now I have two and if I keep them in sync, I will always have one available.

GeniAus said...

I hadn't thought of backing up my feeds before Anonymous and Kristin but now I've had a fright I will certainly be doing it.

GeniAus said...

Kristin, You are better than me. I have around 500 blogs that I follow and I'd never manage to remember them all!

Rosemary said...

I went to The Old Reader as well and have started looking around for another one. I asked that question on the Technology Genealogy group and Facebook where NewsBlur was mentioned as an alternate and also, IIRC, bloglines. Haven't made my mind up yet.

Charissa said...

This is fantastic!

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