Notes on creating a new Blogger blog from another Blogger blog's Google Takeout backup

Quick Info

To create a new Blogger blog from another Blogger blog's Google Takeout backup (new Takeout blog backup and not old all in one XML file backup):
  1. Create a new Blogger blog.
  2. Restore theme and layouts, using Theme -> Restore and providing theme-layouts.xml file of other Blogger blog backup folder as input to it.
  3. Restore posts, pages and comments, using Settings -> Import content -> Import and providing feed.atom file of other Blogger blog backup folder as input to it.
Back up or import your blog, https://support.google.com/blogger/answer/41387?hl=en clearly states that it is feed.atom or older xml backup files that have to provided as input to "Import posts, pages & comments to your blog". 

Details

Ref: Blogger Text LMS Backup-Restore

I have created a very simple content/presentation only LMS using Blogger with minor customization of its Contempo Light theme. The blog was created under one of my Google userIds which I am referring to as rG user. 

About this blog: Text version of Test LMS blog (has only dummy data) now has 4 courses with 3 courses having lessons and 1 course only overview. The overall UI of the blog - menu header, three segments menu etc. are done for a very simple LMS blog. Initiated a backup. ... Downloaded the Google Takeout zip file ... The size on disk for the test LMS blog folder is only 184 KB. It has 5 files. ... This data can act as a starter text version template (with only dummy data) for a very simple Blogger LMS blog.

The blog url is ravilms.blogspot.com. 
...

Under dG user, created dravilms.blogspot.com blog.
I want to create a copy of ravilms.blogspot.com from its Google Takeout backup: ...\Blogger-LMS\20260102-Blog-Backup\Ravi Test LMS

Using Theme -> Restore, I restored theme-layouts.xml. That did not restore any posts/pages from backup.
Using Settings -> Import content -> Import , I imported theme-layouts.xml. That did not restore any posts/pages from backup.
Using Settings -> Import content -> Import , I imported feed.atom. On first view of posts and pages, I did not see any posts/pages. But then I refreshed the blog dashboard webpage. After that posts/pages of ravilms.blogspot.com are now shown in dravilms.blogspot.com dashboard.
As I had not refreshed the Blogger dashboard webpage after the first restore and import of theme-layouts.xml, I don't know whether those steps itself imported posts and pages data.

The author of the pages and posts is dG user (different from rG user who is author of posts and pages in ravilms.blogspot.com). So user-b can import posts and pages from a backup of a blog created and operated by user-a, and then the imported posts and pages are owned by user-b.
...

Back up or import your blog, https://support.google.com/blogger/answer/41387?hl=en clearly states that it is feed.atom or older xml backup files that have to provided as input to "Import posts, pages & comments to your blog".

But Blogger does not clearly explain how the theme is to be restored from the Google Takeout blog backup. The backup has theme-layouts.xml whose name indicates it has theme and layouts. If one does backup of the theme separately, the name of the file it creates has theme but not layouts and is in the format: theme-19-digit-blogID.xml. 
....

Blogger seems to separate:

  • Theme / layout (UI, widgets, HTML, CSS, layout structure)

  • Content (posts and pages)

Theme → Restore (theme-layouts.xml)

  • This action only restores the theme:

    • Layout structure

    • Gadgets/widgets

    • Theme HTML/CSS

  • It never restores posts or pages.

feed.atom seems to be the only file that matters for posts/pages

Settings → Import content → Import → feed.atom

  • Blogger seems to queue the import

  • Initial dashboard view sometimes does not immediately reflect the imported content

  • A manual page refresh forces the dashboard to re-fetch data

Ownership transfer: rG user → dG user

What seems to happen during import

  • Blogger does not preserve original author identity

  • Imported posts/pages are:

    • Assigned to the currently logged-in Google account

    • i.e., dG user in my case

...

Google Takeout Blogger backup's theme-layouts.xml file may be equivalent to the theme-19-digit-blogID.xml file Blogger produces on clicking: Theme → Backup → Download.

...
Blogger has stopped providing single blog downloads as XML files. For even getting backup data of one blog, a user is forced to download all his Blogger data as a Google Takeout operation. So Takeout is what any Blogger user has to use to get a backup of his blog data.

Another point: So to recreate a blog from a blog backup (new Takeout blog backup and not old all in one XML file backup), it seems to be a two step process:
1) Restore theme and layouts, using Theme -> Restore and providing theme-layouts.xml file as input to it.
2) Restore posts, pages and comments, using Settings -> Import content -> Import and providing feed.atom file as input to it.
...

Besides theme-layouts.xml and feed.atom files, the Google Takeout backup for my blog has three other files:
followers.csv - Seems to be list of blog followers
settings.csv - Seems to be blog settings
theme-classic.html - is a 20 byte (yes, byte) file with some text

These files do not seem to play any role in blog import/restore and are not specified as input files to the restore/import process to recreate a blog from its backup.

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