Backing up your Contest is easy.
If you plan on making changes to an application (live or staging), we recommend you first make a backup. Inside the Application click "Backup and Restore". On this page, on the left hand side, change the filename field (something like "myappname_todaysdate" works well) and click "Download". This will download an XML file of all the templates and translations in that app. This is a great way to move your staging application changes to the live application. If something goes wrong, or you want to update a live app with the staging version, simply restore that XML file. On the right side of the same page, click "browse", find that XML backup, and click "Restore".
It is recommended that you have two applications for each project. A live app and a staging app. The live app will contain your custom URL(s) (http://www.mydomain.com/) and the project.fm domain (myappname.projects.fm) and will be what the the world sees. The staging app will only need a projects.fm domain (staging.myappname.projects.fm) and it's where you should do all your development. And only after testing should you backup and restore the staging app to live.
