Three Ways to Back Up AOL Journals (and Hometown)

By Joe on October 3, 2008

Yesterday, I posted one method to crawl and backup your entire AOL Journals destination. In theory, that can also work with Hometown. One limitation is that it is pretty advanced for people to do, and there is room for error. Today, Marah from Anti-AOL has another method that makes it much easier for AOL Users.

Simply, those methods are:

Now despite these methods, AOL states they are making efforts to allow easy transport to Blogger. One tiny problem…

Not everyone wants Blogger. They want to take their content with them to a variety of blog software and manage their experience. Many, I can imagine are going to get their own domain and hosting and host their blog there. People are tired of having their toes crushed by big companies who dictate where (and how) they share their personal thoughts.

I stand firm that I will only give AOL credit for for giving 30 day notice to bloggers if they provide a universal export on their blog. Every real blog software offers it. Why not AOL? Unlike, e-mail; blog destinations are not the assets, it’s the content.

To some, 100K users might not be much; but they are where people have learned their basic Web page uploading skills, basic blogging skills; and you probably know at least ONE person who does blog on AOL Journals. It’s not about the number of users, its about doing the right thing to support those users.

I’ll share with you that AOL HQ does not give a shit about users. They really don’t. Truthfully, they believe that users are like sheep and you need to corral them to destinations via the Welcome Screen. They don’t care, as long as it makes their page views go up; they couldn’t care. Greed runs AOL. The irony here is that AOL Journals and Hometown DID contribute a chunk of traffic to the Company. I am stumped as to why they killed it with out at least giving a solid attempt to fix it.

Thanks to all the feedback, AOL Users. I feel your pain and your confusion. Please take a few moments and read those links and decide which solution works best for you. It’s funny, AOL make it easy to create your blog and Web page — but double the difficulty on taking it with you.

S.P. Gass

Thanks again, Joe. I just downloaded all of my old aol hometown files.

S.P. Gass

Joe, thanks for posting this. I still have some old pics up at AOL hometown (example= http://hometown.aol.com/stevengass1/maine.html ). Since it's not tons of stuff, I probably will just manually ftp the files to my computer. But thanks again for posting, I would have lost all that stuff otherwise.

Marah Marie

Joe, thanks for the mention and the backlink. I spent the better part of two nights looking all over the Web for an answer for the 100,000 AOL Journals and Hometown users who's spaces will soon be deleted - since AOL does not provide a way for them to automatically back up and export their content - which I was surprised to learn, since LiveJournal and Wordpress, the two platforms I've used more than any others, have always offered those options to their users.

Both also have an extensive amount of free, third party software available on the Web that accomplishes the same things.

No one writes third party software to accomplish the back up and export of AOL content, though, and this late in the game, chances are no one ever will.

I tried maybe 10 different website archivers and downloaders in the last few days, including HTTP Tracker, Aignes Website Archive and many similar programs which ran the gamut from free software to trialware to pay-to-unlock programs.

Backstreet Browser combined the best features of all the programs I tried: it has an easy, attractive user interface, every configuration option most people need, lightning fast download speeds, it's light on system resources, it's free to keep forever with no nags to buy or upgrade the program and no spyware ever, hard copies are made of every file you download, and a built in web browser that runs on IE's rendering engine is included to view what you grabbed from your web space.

It also saves your CSS and other design files so you can recreate your AOL space the way it was somewhere else if you want to.

"Not everyone wants Blogger. They want to take their content with them to a variety of blog software and manage their experience...People are tired of having their toes crushed by big companies who dictate where (and how) they share their personal thoughts."

I agree with you on that completely.

Still, if AOL is willing to work with Blogger to get user's blogs exported to Blogger's platform, if I was an AOL user, I would go for it. Once the user's content on AOL is backed up to Blogger it can then be easily exported to another web space of the user's choosing, and the Blogger name space deleted. Lack-of-export-problem solved. It's not the most elegant or flexible solution...but it is a solution.

And hey, this is AOL we're talking about here after all...we'll be lucky if they work with any company before Oct. 31st to get these user's journals and content exported to another platform and we all know it. AOL is nothing if not unprofessional and uncaring about helping users preserve their hard work, and they prove it time and time again.

Three Ways to Back Up AOL Journals (and Hometown)

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