How to Backup Your Blogger Theme / Template

A step-by-step guide on backing up a Blogger.com Theme / Template for the newest Blogger UI updates.

We have another guide on backing up the template in Blogger but since the roll-out of the newer UI and the changes in the design we are updating the steps with a new tutorial for relevant visual demos.

You can still check the old tutorial on backing up the template here though it is not relevant anymore : http://www.stramaxon.com/2012/03/backup-your-template-of-your-blogger.html

Why back-up a template / theme ?

In the Blogger environment we often want to add a new widget or a functionality in our blog and tutorials ask us to make changes to our templates, it is important we have a backed-up template so if anything goes wrong we can always fallback to the previous version.

There are more reason why -
  1. Making changes to Blogger templates to add functionality or change design
  2. When trying out new themes / template
  3. Using the template / theme again on another blogger blog
Read below for steps on backing up a template / theme, note that we are going to use the terms "template" and "theme" interchangeably. 

Backing Up the Template / Theme on BlogSpot

Let's start with backing up the template.
  1. Log-into your Blogger account to go to your Dashboard. 
  2. From the blog's drop-down list choose the blog

  3. On the left pane choose the "Theme" option

  4. In the Theme section page, click on the "Backup / Restore" button on the top right corner of the page

  5. A dialog box may appear, to download the template backup click on the orange "Download" button as shown below -

  6. A file with a name similar to theme-2887119284088758674.xml will be downloaded. This file is the backup template / theme file, it can be used to recover your template / theme on Blogger. 

That's it, save the theme .xml file at a safe place where you can access it in the future in case you have a broken template. Make it a practice to take a backup of the template before making any changes to it. 

Restoring the Template / Theme Using the XML file

In the previous section you learn how to download a backup of your template. Restoring the template is simple as well, 

  1. in the last section follow till Step #4
  2. Now in the dialog box that opens, which looks like this click "Choose file" (maybe labelled differently on different browsers) -

  3. Browse to the template's XML file and then click on "Upload" 
  4. Once the upload finishes your template will be restored. 
That's it. Do let us know if you have any questions or suggestions regarding this tutorial.