Saturday, October 13, 2012

No backup & I'm incompetent

I am aways so careful when it comes to backups of photos, but I did lose some a few years ago as I believe they were archived to DVDs and probably misplaced. My system is much simplier these days, I just keep them on portable Hard Drives but I have many. I have never had a backup for my blog. I never thought that my photo host would shut down

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Fuzzy vision inspired by Martha

This morning I had to drive to Surrey for our weekly breakfast so I had time to comtemplate my predicament. I am sad, upset and I cannot figure out how to save my web pages. I am also anxious and hyperventilating over my ineptitude.

I have had some excellent suggestions from BlueKat and I have already tried her suggestions(s).

I have an older version of Word and I tried to save some pages and there was a block of recurring blackness covering my blog on random scattered places which covers the text and photos. So it doesn't work. I can't spend my working time working on this but I don't have a PDFwriter at home

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Tears coming from the sky

Then Doug came up with an idea so I spent about 6 hours today trying to save my pages as HTML. But then I had a problem. I followed Bluekat's idea of displaying more pages per view and I happily went about my overwhelming chore of going to every month and saving my pages. Everything seemed to be going smoothly and I thought "what a piece of cake" this is.

but then when I checked, it wasn't saving 31 posts per page as I set in the settings section. There must be some sort of limitation as to how many pages that it saves as it is not consistent in what it does. Sometimes it saves 7 pages, sometimes 5 and sometimes 12, even though I set the default to show 31 pages.

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Martha: this is our neighbourhood, we have no colour in our dull trees

So when I thought I had accomplished the impossible in short time, I had to do it all again cross-referencing what I had already done and saving each month in multiple files

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we do have some tree-lined streets in the city

I am not sure if these HTML files will load by themselves or whether they have to search for links on the 'Net. Right now they display the images, but they may not later when Webshots turns their switch OFF on November 1st. I am fretting because I do not have the knowledge to save my pages and everything I do doesn't work. Time is ticking away and there is less than 3 weeks left before my photos disappear.

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Our monsoon season has started. nearly 2" of rain today, and another 1" of rain and heavy winds tomorrow

I can't do any more. I am up against a brick wall. I don't have the software and I am not a computer Guru. I am not even sure that I managed to save everything. All I know is that this is giving me migraines, and I don't usually get headaches. Once November 1st rolls around I know I will be feeling better as it will be too late to do anything, but for now I am feeling that there is something I can still do to stop my impending disaster, but I am powerless to figure out what that is

So for now imagine that I have jumped out of an airplane, but don't have the skills to pull the Rip-cord

I have been using Photobucket for the past few posts. They have upgraded their software and it is much better than Webshots, but you get a lot of ads. I am not getting a good feeling and think that they may also change their focus. I am not getting a warm feeling . . .

I know nothing about programming or how to set up my own.com and I really don't want to waste anymore time at my stage in life. There are better things to do than to sit in front of a keyboard. I'd rather be riding someplace "where I have never been before". And hand my notes to my personal Clerk to deal with.

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This is the best that I could come up with here in the heart of the City. We don't get the colours that you get in the EAST

I'm not sure I wish to invest my sweat and labour into Photobucket and have this same scenario happen a few years down the road. I would like to gravitate to a more permanent solution and have total control but without the headaches of having to learn programming.


My, how quickly our seasons are changing. Just a short few weeks ago we were feeling the heat of summer. I actually had to wear Jeans today instead of my trademark shorts, and a fleece jacket with rain liner

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but it won't be much longer before I have to change out of my natural waterproof footwear and into something

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with a bit more warmth

18 comments:

  1. How about something like BlogBooker.com. This is a donation supported company that allows you to generate a PDF of your blog, including photos, for free. There are other services but basically from the Blogger Dashboard, you make a backup of your blog, which is all the text and hyperlinks to your photos, on your computer. You then upload the backup to the book site and their software retrieves all the photos and produces a PDF. I tried this with a couple of sites after some discussion about backing up your blog. I don't remember where that discussion took place, maybe Stacy's blog?

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    1. Richard:

      You are the best ! Thank you for recommending BlogBooker.com While the formating needs some improvement, I now have a PDFbook of my blog. It was great to see my computer doing all the work while I just looked at that little wheel spinning, and then it was finished.

      I had no hesitation in giving them their recommended "donation" via PayPal

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  2. Dear Bobskoot:

    I am not a terribly smart person, and I'm even less smart when it comes to computer stuff. I have two questions for you:
    1) Don't you compose your blogs and other presentations in some kind of a word processing program first, before dragging them onto a blog?
    2) Don't you move your photographs into a photo storing program, resident to your system, before putting them in a blog?

    If so, you should have everything already. All you have to do is wait for the misery of winter to put them in order, or toss the less significant ones.

    Maybe I just didn't understand something.

    Fondest regards,
    Jack/Reep
    Twisted Roads

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    1. Jack:

      It was great to hear your voice tonight and that you are well on the mend. I am glad that you are finally getting PayPal so that I can finally pay for your "Conversations with a Motorcycle" book .

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  3. Bob, just unplug your computer from it's 'net connection and see if the pages you saved still load the pictures. Or look at the folder where you are saving those pages and see if the pictures are in there as they should be. Firefox definitely saves the pictures, even the little icons and stuff that make up the page.

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    1. Doug:

      See comment to Richard (above). Thank you for your help. I now have HTML files by the month so I could reconstruct if necessary, but now I also have the PDFbook from BlogBooker.com

      I took your suggestion of using Firefox to save my files. I haven't checked every one but they seem to be just fine

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    2. Bob, I'm glad you're getting it worked out. A four or five years ago Blogger locked me out of my blog for a week, their spam bots decided it might be a spam blog. Besides hurting my feelings (spam??) it scared the crap out of me because I realized all my work was at the mercy of nameless, faceless bots and unreachable tech support people. That's when I got a lot more dedicated about saving my posts locally.

      Now I need to look into that blog-to-book thing, sounds interesting.

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    3. Doug:

      I am glad that I now have a backup but I am still not happy that my blog will be 99% devoid of photos prior to last week. To me the blog experience has to include lots of photos. I had nearly 6,000 images linked to my posts and all those links will be dead at the end of the month. But thanks to you this was discovered in time for me to have a backup produced, so while I will have memories, most will be lost on the internet.

      Looking at my Electronic PDF book I think it is great. It is well done and I didn't have time to figure out how to change the front and rear cover photos. My time was finite and the task was to do my backup. If I ever have this printed I can have them produce a different image on the front page.

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  4. Bob,

    I am glad to see you have a method of backing up you older post and photos. I can't even imagine how frustrating it must have been to learn they would disappear. It is a reminder to all who blog to make back-ups and hope that your host will live long...

    GAW

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    1. GAW:

      I always thought that I would be able to look back on my posts and smile at all the good memories. but without photos and only words they lose most of their impact. I had to have a record of my posts before my photos disappeared. They are not gone from my hard drive but it is too great a task to upload and relink. I have nearly 6,000 photos on Webshots linked to this blog

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  5. Sorry about the photos Bob. it just shows we are at the mercy of the interweb when we post to it. Try not to stress too much, easier said than done, I know.

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    1. Trobairitz:

      I am better now that I have some hard copies, but not having photos linked to 98% of my posts was frustrating to hear, and thanks to Doug I had some time to save some backups. I never knew anything about this

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  6. Richard has a good suggestion and I'm glad it works. I was going to recommend at least creating a material book before the pictures are lost so that you can at least maintain the posts as you remember. I keep reading about blurb.com.

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    1. Lori:

      without being in control of your destiny subjects you to things you can't do anything about. I want a more secure/permanent solution. I spend more time than people realize linking and coding the HTML images into my posts manually and I am afraid of moving forward if things get deleted again. I checked into Blurb and it is too expensive.

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  7. Bob, I had the same idea as Richard.

    Blogtoprint does the same thing. Just plug in your URL, make some preference choices, and bingo! Here's the URL: http://blogt2print.sharedbook.com

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    1. Actually Blog2Print produces nicer looking output but they limit photos to 1500. They show you a preview then you pay if you want to download. I was shocked to find out that I had more than 1500 pictures posted over the years.

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  8. Bob, I wish I could offer you some words of technical wisdom ... but no can do. I know that bogger offers you a way to preserve your blog in a hard copy/book form which may be the way to go as Richard has already told us, the digital stuff is degenerating (and you will have to continuously regenerate it to preserve it.) I have my fav photos printed and the rest, well, they were a fleeting moment in time, important to only me. Good luck with it all ... keep us posted.

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    1. Karen:

      Yes, Blogger gives you the tools to export in XML format but this is just a file with "external links". If your links are broken, then photos cannot be generated. You have to generate them "BEFORE" Webshots shuts the server, because then your links are broken and no photos will appear. that is why I have been under this time constraint deadline to get my backup before November 1st. Even Blog2print goes to your blog and gets links to your photos. It cannot be done later.

      As for my photos, I have all of them on various hard drives. Loosing them on the Webshots server only breaks the links to the places where they will show on my blog, so after November 1st, all you will get is TEXT. All photos will be effectively Deleted

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