Export. There is a menu item in WP that lest you export out to an XML file, they call it “eXtended RSS or WXR”. The options is under Manage->Export.

Well you should use this to keep a half way decent back up of your blog, but if you want to transfer to another blog service or anything then you want this file. I have been toying around with moving my blog, to TypePad, or MT, or hosted, just to see what happens, and really, none of them are better than self hosted .

What I did find, is that the export wasn’t working for me. Was getting cut off at like 1.4, 1.5 MB and tons of my posts were missing from the export. I read in the forums and such on support but nothing really gave a good answer. So I did what you usually have to do when chokes on some export or import, play with the memory and execution settings in php.ini

What I found was the max execution time was 30 seconds for a script, which was about how long it was taking to export my file. So I upped it to 120 seconds

max_execution_time = 120;

And ran the export again, and lo and behold, my entire blog archive was now in the import file. Yessssss.