friendly reminder: back up your recipes from online sources

Recent internet security events (most recently involving PHP issues, but it appears more are inevitable) have caused some older sites and blogs to go down.
Now is a great time to find those old standby recipes and back them up!

Last night I went to make oatmeal cookies and found that the source of my standby recipe was no longer online! Luckily I knew the name of the website and the name of the recipe, and I was able to use an AI tool (Perplexity) to reconstruct the recipe. There is also the Wayback Machine (although I rarely have luck with it and it takes forever).

I am the first person to admit that my standard procedure is to just favorite a recipe and assume it will always be there when I need it, but without maintenance some old sites are going to break and disappear. I had read warnings that online content might not last forever, this is the first time I have proof.

Right now I'm making an effort to note down recipes as I need them and save them- in a file, in a written cookbook, whatever works. When things calm down in January I'll make a more concerted effort to organize it all better.

Thank you for the heads up Tereza, it makes total sense!

For regularly utilized recipes I tend to print them out, hole punch them, and put them in a three ring binder that lives in my kitchen. The original intent was to have a physical recipe so I don't have to fumble with my phone while I cook but inadvertently keeping the recipes on physical media prevents losing them to "the cloud".

Great reminder. Whenever I find a recipe that I like and know I will use again I will print it to a PDF file and put it in my recipes folder for easy access. Of course then it's important to do regular backups of that data too.

Timothy's method is maybe the ultimate backup for frequently used recipes.

I do the same thing as Timothy. Not only is it backed up forever, but I don't have to deal with the page reloading on my slow phone.  Not to mention that I can see the whole thing fairly easily just by looking at a 7 by 11” page instead of the smaller phone, and I don't have to deal with the pop-ups and videos that a lot of new food blogs have everywhere. One thing I have run into is that a lot of the new blogs don't let you use the print button anymore... Not without subscribing. I have started copying and pasting chunks of the recipe into Google docs and printing it from there.

I also want to share a story why you should back up other things besides recipes that are online and important to you.  I had something really scary happen to me a couple months ago. I thought I had lost my wedding photos!  They were hosted online, I didn't remember I had backed them up, and the hosting site went defunct. My original photographer was able to send them over to me and then much did my chagrin and I did find out they were backed up on a different external hard drive so I made the poor lady do extra work.  But for about five scary days I thought I had wasted thousands and thousands of dollars just assuming something would always be online.

I still use recipe cards and a wooden recipe box with all my recipes fro9m the time I first married.

I also have my Fannie Farmer Cookbook from the same era.

I would not know how to do a backup.

Anne Miller wrote:I would not know how to do a backup.

It's as simple as writing down the recipe on a card and putting it in your box!

When I want to make a real effort (lots of recipes at once, generally), I will copy the text off websites and paste it into a format where I can print it out later (txt or doc).
These get printed and added to my paper cookbook (3 ring binder).
I frankly prefer the paper book because when my family want to make something they know, that's where they look.
I've been adding recipes from around the world there for 30+ years (gulp) that come from everywhere from old zines and spice catalogs to old Yankee Magazine issues to scribbles someone made in a newspaper margin after Thanksgiving dinner. It's also fun to see these and remember where they came from.

Great, I can do all of those.

I like to collect recipes, kinda like a hobby.

My electric co-op magazine has recipe contest winners that I want to make one of these days so I tear the page out and save in a folder.

Over the years I have wanted to make lasagna without ricotta and there was a recipe for that so I plan to try it.  It was developed by someone who had married an Italian.