Dave, can I make a back up of my journal?

Hi Dave,

I love the journal feature of your site. But am wondering.....Normally when I would have a journal like this on my own pc I would make a back up. Is it possible to download my journal to my own pc to back it up that way?
I know I can just save it page by page, but I mean just saving the whole thing in one go and opening it with any of the office programs (access?) or just in html.
It would make me feel a lot more comfortable about the work put in it.
Thanks,
Agnes

Hello Agnes,

When I first created the journal, I realized that folks will want to backup their work for piece of mind.

I am about half-way finished with a backup tool that will let you backup your journal all in one piece, but it's not ready yet. With all the journal pieces (categories, statuses, items, entries, pictures), bundling all these together into a compressed file, automatically, it a difficult thing to do.

But, it is do-able and will be done. I'll make sure to post on the DG forum when it is ready (and, you'll notice the link on the homepage of the journal when it's ready).

By the way, in the meantime: I do nightly backups of the entire server (including the journals) to 2 different locations. This means that every night the entire DG site is replicated across three different machines. In almost a year, we've never lost any data at all! YAY!

Anyway, I hope to get the personal journal backup finished as soon as I can!

Dave

Thanks Dave!

Will it be readible on our own computers as well?
I'm not so much worried about you losing the data (From all the work you do on here I understand that you take great care in handling this site), but as you've heard from another thread on this forum it's not always easy to access the site and isp providers do go down from time to time etc.
But I should have known you're working on this already, you seem to be a step ahead most of the time!
Thanks,
Agnes

Agnes,

It will be readable, but not on a Windows box. It's going to be (technical detail warning here!) a tar file, compressed with gzip. There is no way for me to make it readable on a Windows or Mac box, because the journal is a web-based application that is not portable to a standalone desktop, since it relies on unique identifiers (RIDs) system-wide.

One could certainly decode the file and write a Windows utility that would pull the data out of the backup file, but it's really not extremely useful unless the data is used on the journal on this website.

So, really, the backup is mostly for your own piece of mind that you know that your data is safe. One day I, or someone else, may figure out a way to make the journal work on a standalone windows box, but until then it's all going to have to happen via the DG box.

More details, if you're curious:

I'm going to write a script that pulls out the data from the database for your own journal. This will include hard-coded RID numbers, as well as the unique identifiers for all entries, categories, statuses, and images. Then it'll save all that data to one file and store it in a temporary location on my hard drive.

Then it will go find the actual jpg images that are attached to your journal and include those in the temporary location.

Then, it will archive them in a tar file (similar to "zip" on a Windows box), and then compress the tar file with gzip.

The resulting file (with a .dgj extention) will be presented to you as a downloadable file. If you have an extraordinarily large journal, it may be a massive file that could take hours to download over a modem, but a monthly backup still might be a good idea for true piece of mind.

Dave

Ok, let me see if I understand this...I will be able to download my journal to back it up but will not be able to view it on my system. You already back it up three different ways....So if the site were down I would still need you to restore it before I could use my back up on the site you have already restored? This is obviously way over my head! :}

Zanymuse: You understand correctly. The backup is for your own piece of mind, so that you KNOW that even if I make a huge mistake and lose the data (not going to happen), then your journal is still safe and sound.

But, I have a 100% clear record of never losing data. Thousands of members rely on me for this data, and I take the responsibility seriously.

Dave

Thanks Dave! I'll leave it to you then because I feel comfortable with the status Quo!