Restore A Microblog Site Backup

A backup is only good if you have a way to use it to restore a site. Because Wordpress has been in use for some time, most other blog platforms are capable of importing a Wordpress export (.wxr) file.

To test the Automatic Backup Of A Microblog Site I installed a copy of Wordpress on my Google Pixelbook using Docker by following these instructions .

Before you import your Microblog content you need to install and activate a couple of plugins. One plugin is the Wordpress importer. The second is either Jetpack or JP Markdown so that the markdown formatting used by Microblog is converted to HTML. I found that for a local installation I need to use JP Markdown because the Jetpack set up needs to be able to talk so the Wordpress site, which is not possible because my local installation is not accessible from the Internet.

After you have the plugins installed you can import to the site following the instructions that Wordpress provides. Depending on how many posts you have, the import process can take several minutes to run. I found the import process runs in the background and I monitor the status by refreshing the posts page.

I do not intend to frequently import my backup blog posts to this local Wordpress site, I did this as a test, which is why I am using Docker. The docker-compose.yml shown in the Docker instructions persists the site contents. If you remove the volumes entries in the docker-compose.yml then the site and the data you remove will be deleted each time you do a docker-compose down.

If you want to keep the volumes so that the site persists after you shut down the containers but then want to refresh the site, first bring up the containers and then enter:

docker-compose down --volumes

At this point you can then run docker-compose up -d, recreate your account and re-import the microblog content.