"couldn't retrieve anum for entry" error when exporting journals/comments

[khyron]

Greetings fellow permanent account holders! If you have a moment, I wonder if you'd mind helping me troubleshoot something? I've been running into a really frustrating LJ bug, and I know that many permies also value the ability to back up their LJ content so I thought this might be a good place to ask

Comments

[quirrc]

Did you try Semagic? Links/Synchronization. It does not use xml-rpc.

[khyron]

I'm aware that Semagic can download comments as well as entries (as I recall, it does so by spidering LJ, which isn't the most server-friendly method but at this point I'm too frustrated to care). However I'm not sure whether the XML it produces will actually be useful to me (able to be imported into another blog, like Wordpress).

I decided to give it a shot anyway, and just spent an hour building an up-to-date Windows virtual machine to run it in...and guess what?

Error 500!

Sorry the service is currently unavailable due to technical issues. The page you requested is not available. Frank has been chewing on the wires again.

It's simple, LJ can sense that I want to get out of here and hates me. *sigh*

[quirrc]

Semagic now does it more server friendly than any other program. 500 error is for all users, it is turned on and off several times a day.

[khyron]

Thanks, I see lots of 500 error tickets and complaints now that I look around. Hopefully I'll be able to try this out later...I'm firing up the VM and attempting every 15-30min but so far no luck (the error is instantaneous each time).

I suppose since Semagic implements synchronization on its own, and therefore never respiders an entire journal or anything, it's probably at least as "friendly" as the XML-RPC interface is supposed to be. Ultimately I guess it matters little in my case, because I'm trying to take a complete backup from scratch.

[khyron]

I must be missing the times you're "allowed" to back up? It's been more than 24 hours since I started trying and every single attempt, I get the 500 immediately (not a single entry or comment comes in, not one). Do they throttle access via clients like Semagic or something? Is something weird going on with my specific account? I wish I knew more about the mysteries of LJ.

[quirrc]

I have no idea what is going on, maybe they count server load for particular cluster or something. I just tried and it works. Before one time I tried for 2 journals and one worked and another did not.