breathe... backup.

Jan 06, 2009 13:22

"LiveJournal, the San Francisco-based arm of Sup, a Russian Internet startup, has cut 12 of 28 U.S. employees - and offered them no severance, we're told."

OK people. Take a deep breath.

Things to remember/consider:
  • There is no clear evidence that the demise of LJ is imminent. Valleywag (source of the article I've seen linked everywhere) is like the Perez Hilton of tech news. Reread the article and you will note that the sentence I quoted above is pretty much the only factual information salient to the news of the day. The rest is speculation.
  • The news of heavy layoffs is bad, and the no severance is especially a cruddy way to treat employees. But this does not indicate that LJ is shutting down immediately. Consider alternative explanations. skywayman commented below that "the latest rumor is LJ development is moving to Russian, not stopping completely." Which would make perfect sense. The sky is usually not falling.
  • That said, if LJ is going to be closed, it would be surprising if LJ managment were to just disappear everyone's content with no explicit warning. In the web service closings I've seen, there is typically an announcement that the site will be closed on a certain date and that users should prepare. This makes sense and is the right thing to do. You probably don't need to worry about your LJ suddenly being gone with no warning. But, LJ could easily surprise me. They have been huge idiots before.
  • You should regularly back up your LiveJournal (and your Flickr and your Twitter and your del.icio.us and your whatever other information is important to you that lives on a server you have no control over). It is improbable but possible that any of them could blink out of existence at any time. Then there is plain old error, malfunction, or malevolence. Check this very recent news: Journalspace [a blog hosting service] is no more.

    DriveSavers called today to inform me that the data was unrecoverable.

    Here is what happened: the server which held the journalspace data had two large drives in a RAID configuration. As data is written (such as saving an item to the database), it's automatically copied to both drives, as a backup mechanism.

    The value of such a setup is that if one drive fails, the server keeps running, using the remaining drive. Since the remaining drive has a copy of the data on the other drive, the data is intact. The administrator simply replaces the drive that's gone bad, and the server is back to operating with two redundant drives.

    But that's not what happened here. There was no hardware failure. Both drives are operating fine; DriveSavers had no problem in making images of the drives. The data was simply gone. Overwritten.

    The data server had only one purpose: maintaining the journalspace database. There were no other web sites or processes running on the server, and it would be impossible for a software bug in journalspace to overwrite the drives, sector by sector.

    The list of potential causes for this disaster is a short one. It includes a catastrophic failure by the operating system (OS X Server, in case you're interested), or a deliberate effort. A disgruntled member of the Lagomorphics team sabotaged some key servers several months ago after he was caught stealing from the company; as awful as the thought is, we can't rule out the possibility of additional sabotage.

    But, clearly, we failed to take the steps to prevent this from happening. And for that we are very sorry.

    So, after nearly six years, journalspace is no more.
    Back up the stuff you care about.
  • The bad news is that backing up is hard. To really safely back up your stuff, you need a certain level of technical skill. Even then it is tricky, especially when your important data is scattered around the internet, often in services that don't give you an easy way to get your data out. My dissertation dips into this problem a little bit. People with much more ability than me to get real solutions in place are thinking about this issue. But there just aren't easy solutions right now. Do what you can.
  • elttobretaw reminded me: If there are people you would hate to lose contact with that you can only contact through some website... get some other contact info. Social backup.
  • And regarding the current stampede: A bajillion people running all sorts of backup scripts and apps to grab huge amounts of content from LJ is probably going to cause some problems with LJ itself, so do not freak out if you get error messages or LJ goes down.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-Now, here is some information about backing up LJ
Windows: What I use
LJ Archive
  • A program you download and install on your computer.
  • Graphical, point and click installation and user interface
  • Backs up your LJ posts and comments to your computer.
  • Saves your data in some format I don't know, but exports to HTML, XML, or MIDI (midi?)
  • You must have the proper .NET framework to use LJ Archive. That is not a big deal. LJ Archive's site links you to where to download the right version of .NET. You do that and use the simple installer like anything else. Then you install LJ Archive.
  • Info and download: http://fawx.com/software/ljarchive/
This has always worked great for me. I find the search function to be limited, but if necessary I can export to XML and do whatever grepping I want.

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Other Windows options I have not tried.
(Many/most of these tools are rather old, but the guts of LJ don't seem to have changed too much).

LJBackup
  • "a tool which has been written to allow users of LiveJournal to download their journals for backup purposes. The downloaded backups can also be searched, browsed and exported in a variety of different formats, including HTML, CSV and XML. It is also able to download comments others have made in your journal."
  • Download, install, use? Has some help documentation and an associated LJ community.
  • Info and download: http://ljbackup.yamnet.co.uk/
LiveJournal Backup Toolkit
  • All the regular features, plus some more. Notably, exports to plain text, and allows export of your backed up LJ to WordPress and other blog tools (without making locked posts public)
  • You probably want to download "the binary including setup wrapper" (the second download option). You'll double click the downloaded file to start the install process. (Why must so many tool builders make their language inpenetrable to novices and intimidating to non-experts? The vast majority of people don't know what binaries or setup wrappers are. Oh yes, because as we become expert, we forget all the little pieces of knowledge we needed in order to know what we know and everything is just obvious to us. My mantra is "if you can't explain it like you'd explain it to your mom (assuming your mom is not a tech expert), you aren't explaining it well enough.) Or, we don't care if non-experts can use our stuff.
  • Also requires .NET framework. Follow the "The .NET Framework 1.1" link, download from there and install before installing/running the Toolkit.
  • Info and download: http://www.thejackol.com/2004/05/29/the-livejournal-backup-toolkit/
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Platform independent (i.e. works on Linux, Mac, and if you've installed Python and/or Perl, Windows
ljdump
ljdump - another version
  • Python script
  • Backs up a bit more data than the other ljdump: entries, comments, profile, userpics, FOAF, interests list, fdata, userpic list files
  • Does not require a config file
  • Has clear instructions
  • Info and download: http://codex.journal-press.com/Ljdump
ljmigrate
LJSM
  • Perl script
  • "Saves posts, memories, graphics. Converts relative links to absolute. Creates contents page, supports http proxy."
  • Basically creates a mirror of your LJ, which you could just upload to any web server and it would act like a static website.
  • Has companion tool to manipulate privacy settings
  • Has companion tool to join all downloaded posts into one long file
  • Step by step instructions on using ljsm and other pointers
  • Info and download: http://ljsm.feechki.org/index_en.html
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Web based
LiveJournal's own journal export feature
LJBook
  • Could not handle the LJ Backup Panic of January 2009
  • Currently out of service
  • Converts your LJ to a PDF file. I never used this. Does it download the whole thing every time??
  • http://www.ljbook.com/frontpage.php
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Mac
The scripts and web-based tools above are all I've seen.

I thought you could just type "back up my lj" somewhere or mime this into the webcam and it would magically happen... *ducks*

[edit]
steforama writes: The client XJournal lets you download, but saves things in an annoying way that really only lets you read through the program itself.
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For a little levity, an alternative vision of the LJ future...
The bad old good old days! Imagine... What if they just quit maintaning it and the service started deteriorating and you could never be sure if you were about to lose a whole post or comment when you hit *post* (always copy first!) and 50% of the time the database was down or clogged? Maybe most people would leave in disgust and the only ones of us left would be the ones who would be reminiscing that, Hey! It's just like old times! ;-p

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I'll be adding more to this list if I find more. I'm making it a public post. Feel free to link here.
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