Windows Live Writer Backup Utility [Updated]

Update: Version 1.0.1 released. Backing up your Blog settings now includes the blog templates so you don’t need to download your blog styles now either. Download link is same as before.

Someone in the Live Writer MSN Groups asked the question about moving his blog settings from one PC to another new PC, and what needed to be brought across. Joe Cheng (MSFT) replied that he only needed to make a backup of a registry key in the Windows registry, which is all very well and good, but what about the average user, should they really be faffing about in the Windows registry? I didn’t think so either. So I set out to create a backup tool that will do that for the user, and while it’s at it, backup other Live Writer things too, like posts, and plugins.

And so the Windows Live Writer Backup Utility was born:

As you can see, you have the option to back up the blog settings (so if you have multiple blogs or FTP settings configured, for example, you can take all those blog settings to another PC), Draft blogs, Recent blogs, and the Plugins that you have installed. Usage of this program is simple enough, select what you want to backup, and hit the backup button. This will then ask you where you want to save your backup file to, this will create a *.wlwbackup file: this holds all the data for the parts you selected:

To restore, just run the Utility up, click Restore and point to the previously made wlwbackup file and off you go. It’s as easy as that. One warning though when restoring, this will get rid of all settings, blog entries and plugins that are currently on the PC you’re restoring to (It will only replace what is in the backup file, so for example if you didn’t backup plugins, they wouldn’t get replaced). There is a warning before you restore though, just to remind you:

Some important notes: If you are using Windows Vista and you have UAC turned on then it has been noted that you might need to run the application with elevated privileges if you are planning to backup the Blog settings. To do this, right click on the shortcut/executable and click Run as administrator:

Hope this helps everyone out. Any problems, leave a comment here or email me at wlm[at]scottisafool.co.uk.

Download link: http://www.scottisafool.co.uk/LiveWriterBackupSetup.msi

SL