Saving my LJ

[bobquasit]

Ridiculous as it may sound, my journal here is the largest body of writing that I've ever produced. It contains more of my thoughts than anything in the world, apart from my brain of course! :D

I'd like to be able to preserve it. Partly, I must admit, because the thought of death has been on my mind lately; I want to think that there will be at least something left of me that people will remember, Sebastian most of all.

The problem is that LJ-archive won't work for my journal. As far as I can tell, there must be a comment somewhere in the journal that contains some sort of code which is violently incompatible with LJ-archive; not only will it not archive my journal, but it completely destroyed the archive I had. Nothing in my journal has been preserved.

I went over and begged for help several times on the LJ-archive community and in other places, but had no luck. Mostly there was no response at all. I did some research online, and still found nothing. So I'm giving up on LJ-archive.

But I don't trust the Russian owners of LJ any more. They may decide to pull the plug at any moment, or hold all our journals hostage, or...well...who knows? So I need to figure out a way to make a backup or copy of my journal somehow.

One way would be to print it all out in hardcopy. But that would be a huge project, and occupy an enormous amount of paper. It simply isn't practical.

Perhaps I could use some other software? I don't think there are any alternatives to LJ-archive, though. There are other site-grabbing programs, of course, but will they be able to log in to my account and grab hidden posts? Probably not.

So I may have to simply "print" all of my entries as Adobe Acrobat files. I'd probably set up a folder structure to organize them by year and month, with the files themselves dated appropriately. That way I could also save my voice posts, and I believe the links in my posts would be functional.

Does that sound reasonable? Am I missing something? Can anyone suggest a better way?

Comments

[oldwolf.livejournal.com]

Or you could go to each page and save each one with a date stamp in the name. File/Save As...

And I'll be shipping 7.8.5.0 to you soon. Since I ran into the same issue.

[oldwolf.livejournal.com]

Oh, and could you email me your addy again. I lost it in the 24hr rebuild I had to do. Since I'm too stupid to write anything down. Thanks.

[bobquasit.livejournal.com]

I considered that too. But I suspected that that would be more cumberson and liable to problems - if, say, some of the source material on LJ were to ever disappear - than just outputting them as PDFs.

[oldwolf.livejournal.com]

Then save the source material the same way. I believe if you save as: txt then it shows the links. I know there's gotta be a way.

I also vaguely remember someone ordering all of their blogs from LJ on disk..... Don't remember who it was though.

[davidn]

If you're still looking, you can use http://www.ljbook.com/ to prepare and download your entire journal as a PDF. You do have to give it your password, but I do it periodically and I've never had a problem as a result. And you can always change it to something else afterwards.

(Yes, sometimes I get distracted following people's journal links.)

[bobquasit.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the tip! Unfortunately the service was "too busy" today, so I'm going to wait and try it again later. But it's great to know that it's out there.