Danger, Will Robinson!

[kerravonsen]

After hearing the news, I
(a) double-checked that my IJ is what I think it is
(b) tried to find an easy method of backing up my LJ
(c) came to the conclusion that there isn't one (at least, not for Linux users)
(d) used the LJ Export interface to export my entries from 2003 onwards, one month at a time (sigh)

The options for backing up one's LJ seem to be:
1) use LJ export (which gets all the entries, but is slow and manual and doesn't include the comments)
2) use wget to spider one's LJ, which would include the comments, but only includes public posts - despite NUMEROUS attempts, I could not get wget to be able to access locked posts.
3) download each and every journal entry by hand (insanely slow and not feasible)

Arrrgh!

ETA: I found something! ljmigrate is a python script that works on Linux and backs up your journal (and optionally migrates it) and saves comments! I'm trying it out now; I hope it works.

Comments

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

So you can't run ljarchive? When I grabbed it off Sourceforge today it appeared to be available in several different formats including "all platforms" and "platform independent" -- surely one of those must work on Linux?

[kerravonsen]

Looking at various comments about it, it apparently uses .net, which is supposedly cross-platform, but the calls it uses are incompatible with mono (which is the GNU/Linux version of .net) so it still won't work on Linux. I didn't want to waste my time battling with it just in order to confirm that it won't work. (sigh)

[feliciakw.livejournal.com]

Do you know, does it work with Mac? What I saw specifically mentioned Windows, but that doesn't do me much good as a Mac user.

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

Alas, what I said above exhausted the limits of my technical knowledge. I only play a computer geek on TV. :D

[kerravonsen]

See my ETA above - ljmigrate is supposed to work on Mac as well as Linux.

[feliciakw.livejournal.com]

Ah. Muchas thanks. Will check it out when I get the chance.

[kerravonsen]

Well, I've downloaded the src.zip, but I can't find any information on how to run/build it. 8-(

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

You know what? Try talking to brother tapinger. (Tell him I sent you, so he can curse my name rather than yours if need be ). He wrote a script that saved my bacon back when I was trying to transfer my old blog posts over to my LJ -- so he seems to know quite a bit about this stuff and may be able to suggest what you might do.

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

I've been saving it manually ever since I started, 'cause I'm a Luddite and didn't know then that there was any other way... I only lose comments if he thread collapses, which doesn't exacly happen very often :)

[mistraltoes.livejournal.com]

How are you doing that, then? I guess I must be even more of a Luddite than you. :D

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

I just hit "save as" and then "save as HTML only"... they all go in a folder on the drive. IE saves the title, I add the date to it...

Primitive, but it works :)

[mistraltoes.livejournal.com]

Ah. Perhaps I'll try that. I don't care to lose my comments, and I can't see anyone but me wanting access to my old posts. Might be easier than exporting them to IJ.

[mistraltoes.livejournal.com]

I'm not worried that we'll have to move yet, but I have set up an IJ, just as a backup plan. I might see about transferring posts if I feel ambitious, but at the moment I have several things that are more urgent. Including figuring out what equipment I have to order/buy/jury-rig to be able to still watch and record my shows after US TV makes its federally mandated change to digital broadcasting in February.