Tuesday, April 19, 2005

Archiving my journal

   After reading Armand's tale of woe about his journal being deleted for an imaginary TOS violation, I decided it was about time to start archiving my older entries. Even without alleged hackers or inept ISP employees, the world is a capricious place. Servers can crash in the most outrageously catastrophic ways. Stuff can be lost. Stuff is lost. Important stuff. Every day. Here's what I'm doing.

   I went back to my very first entry. I clicked and dragged to highlight the entire entry, including the title and date, but not including the headers or footers. If I wanted, I could have included the comments, but I decided not to. Then, at the top left of the AOL window, I clicked where it says Edit, and from the resulting drop down menu I clicked on Copy. This copied the highlighted text to my Windows clipboard, where it will be held until I copy something else, or turn off the computer.
   I then went back to the top left of my AOL window, clicked on File, and from that drop down menu, I hovered my mouse over the word New, and from the sub menu that showed up, I clicked on Text Document. That caused a small text window to open, with the title "Untitled" in, of all places, the Title Bar. Left clicking in the text area, I ran my pointer down the list and clicked on Paste. What do you think happened? Yes! My journal entry appeared in the text window.
   Next, I went back up to that popular spot: the top left corner of the AOL window, and clicked on File again. This time, I selected from the drop down menu Save As... Another little box popped up. This one was the save window. In the spot where it says File Name, I typed a file name. Fancy that! I made it something that would be relevant to reconstructing the journal later. I used the date of the original entry.
   Now, before I clicked on the Save button, I made sure I was saving to a good location; somewhere I could easily find the entries again. In this case, I created a new folder called Archived journal entries. Then I clicked save.
   Next step: move along to the next entry, and do it all over again. Yes, it is time consuming, but worth it, if your journal entries are valuable to you.

   Now, here's an interesting thing that I only just discovered today. The AOL text document is a format called .rtf. That stands for Rich Text File, which is text with some basic html formatting included. What that means, is that if you have any graphics or pictures in an entry, they get saved right along with the words. You will see that another folder, called files, is created, and the pictures are saved there. As long as you don't move that folder, when you use AOL to open that text document, you will see the graphics in your entry as well. Cool!
   After I get a substantial number of entries saved, I will put them on a CD for true archival storage.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow!  That would be a lot of work for an established journal, but well worth it in case the worst happens.  I'm still amazed by Armandt's experience.  I got TOS'd once, with no explanation, but it was for a message board post and nothing happened to my journal.  I am getting a bit irritated by AOL's community watchdogs that seem to be pulling messages, journals, and TOSing accounts without any explanation or justification.  Its getting a little bit out of hand.

Anonymous said...

I've been thinking about archiving mine and registering it with the U.S. Copyright Office--but it sounds like too much work, especially for something that's already protected by law.  When I do get around to it, I'll probably save them as HTML documents.  The photos are all in my non-AOL domain as well as my hard drive, so that stuff itsn't vulnerable.

Funny thing--I was Googling car seat covers for my 1994 Eagle, and one of the first screens had a link to one of my journal entries.

Karen

Anonymous said...

Great idea!  I'm going to start doing that this weekend. Thanks for the advice
~ Promise

Anonymous said...

glad you caught my post on this Paul .. your entry got me to thinking i really should backup my own journal .. thankfully there is another way short of saving each entry .. i suppose the next feat would be saving my mirrored journal to a disk eh !!!
let me know if you decide to try to tackle the mirroring trick :)
pamela

Anonymous said...

I do this the other way around, of course.  I write everything in a word document, save it to a journal on my computer and back that up on CD weekly.  I then copy and paste into my online journal, so I do not lose anything because of the vagaries of electron migration or other instability.  Seems easier, because I can also edit and select fonts to suit myself, rather than AOL.  Informative entry though, whichever way one chooses to do it.  Bruce  

Anonymous said...

Wow...good for you.  I know of another journal this just happened to also...she did not get a warning...her journal was deleted and she received a notice saying someone reported her and it also had something to do with something she supposedly had in her ftp space...Weird goings on.....

Anonymous said...

And to think back to the time I struggled putting pictures into my FTP space. This sounds like loads of fun to do. I have the print it out archiving, and maybe in time I'll come back to this and try a more technology way of saving entries. Thank you for the road map to archiving.
Rebecca

Anonymous said...

you can save yourself time and highlight and use your right button on your mouse to copy and paste into the new file...rather then pull down all the menus

I've been printing out my entries and comments as I go fortunately - not that they're any earthshakers, but when I'm 80, it might be fun to read over...

thanks for the tip paul!  This should help alot of people..