blogger's backup and restore (export and import) functions do not work properly

Allan and I have spent countless hours this week trying to backup Joy of Sox and to restore posts and comments to wmtc.

I think we are making progress, but I don't know what the final outcome will be. Which is ridiculous. This process shouldn't be this difficult and the outcome shouldn't be in doubt!

Blogger's backup function, through which you export all posts and comments and save them as an XML file, appears to work for small blogs with a few hundred posts and comments. Large blogs like ours with many thousands of posts and comments -- not so much.

We have been searching for an external, non-Blogger backup tool. Mostly we found nothing. After days of searching, Allan did find one option. To backup JoS, it took 26 hours and saved a file that is 23 GBs! That is crazy, given the most recent XML file produced by a Blogger backup was around 200 MBs. 

Right now we believe we have every wmtc post (thank [something]) and all comments except comments from May 2019 to the present. I can live with that. However, we have not been able to restore anything yet, because Blogger's restore function is not working. 

Of course we have posted on Blogger support, and of course that is being ignored.

Important update! I've learned that the 23 GB backup file from Joy of Sox is not XML and cannot be imported. So: never mind. Not an option.

More important update! All comments are gone except (a) the most recent comments, after the backup was done, plus (b) 1,000 comments from 2006.

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