Eric TF Bat's Journal

I'd never actually heard of JournalSpace, yet another blogging site like LJ and Blogger and the rest, until Bart mentioned that he was no longer there. Why? Because a disgruntled ex-employee deleted the entire site and destroyed every trace of several years of blog entries from every user. Minor bummer, dude.

Now, of course, there's the news that the Russian ~~mafia~~ corporation that owns LJ is sacking most of its American staff, without warning or severance pay (stay classy, guys!). It's at this stage that I'm glad I have backups...

Incidentally, if you would like a backup of your LJ, I heartily recommend ljArchive, a Windows-only (d'oh!) program that makes a complete backup of entries and comments in a way that can be easily exported into another blog if LJ does go belly-up. Sure, the friends page is hard to replicate, but you can always remind your LJ friends to get onto Facebook as insurance; at least with backup software you won't lose your ~~memes, whinges and Quantum Leap slash fic collection~~ breathless prose.

Give it a try. There's not a lot of money in providing a service, and johnny-come-lately Russian entrepreneurs are even less interested in providing a service for its own sake than the johnny-come-slightly-earlier American entrepreneurs we're used to.

Edited to add: following

aryanhwy's suggestion, I checked out ljdump, which works like ljArchive except (a) it runs on Linux and any other OS with Python installed, and (b) it saves the lot in a great vomit of XML files, which I can write tools to process. Not as neat as ljArchive, but it did handle my whole LJ in one go without suffering the timeout bug that prevents me installing ljArchive anywhere new (I can use it on a machine that has been using it for a while, because incremental updates are OK, but when it tries reading my entire LJ it fails).

Hey,

boutell! Looks like we've found a program that doesn't have the problem that Tag10K also has, of timing out on large LJs. When I get a block of time, I'll see how it does it, and we'll maybe get Tag10K back on the air. Yay!

(Leave a comment)

aryanhwy

2009-01-09 11:26 am (UTC)

Was ljdump one of the programs you were talking about the other week that works up to a certain number of entries and then just fails? I used it last night to yank my journal (670 entries); it was easy to use and is not platform specific, so I'd recommend it unless it is the one with that rather unfortunate problem.

etfb

2009-01-09 12:32 pm (UTC)

See my edits: it seems ljdump is the Holy Grail I was looking for: an open source program that doesn't barf on my LJ. Thank you!

2009-01-09 12:56 pm (UTC)

Glad that worked! It was the first hit I got last night when I googled for "archive LJ". It seemed pretty idiot proof and worked easily enough on my journal, so I was happy.

2009-01-09 01:07 pm (UTC)

What OS are you using? ljArchive is still ideal for Windows, modulo the barfing problem. They're talking about a GTK (Linux/Gnome) version, but it's not there yet. It uses .NET, so it might port to Mono; I don't know. Probably won't work with WINE.

2009-01-09 01:12 pm (UTC)

My desktops at home and the office are windows, my laptop is linux, and all of my non-academic email and website are done sshed into Joel's webserver, which is linux. So I ran ljdump on the webserver, since it's got a python compiler.