Whoah...

[sabrinamari]

LJ has been down enough that I'm aware I need to back up my journal. That's pretty intimidating---I have 6 years+ of LJ to export.

Damn.

Comments

[kmusser]

I used ljarchive (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ljarchive/) and it was relatively painless.

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

Does it allow you to back up comments as well as entries? Can a computer dolt use it?

[the-smith-e.livejournal.com]

How are you doing it?

[elphaba-of-oz.livejournal.com]

Uh, Dreamwidth? I think I can get you a code if you want one.

[kmusser]

Yes, does the whole journal including comments all at once - for 6 years will take a little while to run, but definitely easy to use.

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

Got a Dreamwidth code from L. but kinda intimidated by the prospect...

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

Trying to make a decision now.

[elphaba-of-oz.livejournal.com]

It is easy as pie to import your entire journal and set up cross posting. I did it a few years ago. Ever since I have been making all of my entries on Dreamwidth, and cross posting them here. I feel safer doing that.

[pagandelight.livejournal.com]

Can you post some instruction for us? I was recently given a code as well and set up an account, but have not idea how to back up my LJ on there.

Dreamwidth posted this today :( When they open up imports again I will post instructions.

[elphaba-of-oz.livejournal.com]

April 10th, 2011
New imports temporarily stopped; import queue paused
posted by denise in dw_maintenance at 10:54am on 10/04/2011
The situation with LJ's DDoS affecting our import queue has only gotten worse since my last post, and delays/slowdowns from LJ means that the queue will not clear anytime soon (due to the length of time each job takes to complete or fail with the extremely slow connections we are experiencing). At this point, it's also possible that the traffic from DW's importer is making LJ's situation worse, which we absolutely do not want to do!

We are therefore temporarily pausing the existing import jobs until the traffic clears up some and we are able to further modify the importer so that it is even less of a load on LJ. We are also temporarily stopping the ability to queue new imports, so that once we bring the import queue back up, it will give the queue the chance to clear a bit. (Also, we'd like to minimize the impact on LJ.)

We will re-enable the existing import jobs in the queue once we are able to make some changes to the importer in order to lower the risk that we're making things worse for LJ even more (reducing the number of times a job will try before it fails, further rate-limiting our queries). At that point, we will let the existing jobs in queue run for a while until we can clear out the queue a bit. Once the queue clears, we will re-enable the starting of new jobs.

It will be at least a few days until we are able to re-enable new imports.

If you already have an import job in the queue, you don't need to do anything. It will be automatically re-started when we bring importing back online. (It's not possible for you to cancel an import once it's started -- sorry!)

If you're importing your journal because you want a backup of your LiveJournal, you may want to try the LJ Archive software, which will give you a local copy of your journal. (You can't upload it into your DW account, but at least you will have the backup!)

If you're trying to import from a source other than LJ, I'm really sorry that the LJ DDoS slowdowns are affecting you! We're working right now on the ability to only pause imports from a single source, rather than all of them. Once we have that, we'll re-enable imports from sites other than LJ, and let the LJ imports sit in the queue until LJ is feeling better.

I'm really sorry about all the inconvenience!

[welshbard.livejournal.com]

I need to point out that LJ has been down not because of technical issues with their network or software, but because of external distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS). These are large networks of computers all sending thousands of LJ requests a second in order to tie it up and not let anyone do anything.

And the first attack failed, because LJs network was up to the task, so the attacks increased tenfold. Then they put more security in place, and that kept them off for a week. Now, they've put more security into place, and I haven't seen it go down since.

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

I understand this, and I don't blame LJ. Yet this is where my soul lives, and i need to protect it.

"where your soul lives"

[angiedub.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you posted this, because this is the one place that has stuff I don't want to lose either. And I've only been on here since January. Got a nifty little 300GB hard drive I'm going to export mine to. The articles I've written, I wrote on my word processor first, so I already have back ups.
I'll look into some of the other stuff people mentioned too.
How's your draft going

Re: "where your soul lives"

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

Angie, I get it. I can't believe I haven't backed up all this writing---I think it's because I'm not very computer literate and the prospect of figuring this out is very intimidating. Good for you that you already have a plan in place to back up what you've written!

I have a box in the back of my clothes closet with about 20 formerly blank books full of thoughts, writing and responses to my experiences. There might even be 30, I don't know. Lying in bed a few days ago I noticed that I had put a whole shelf of personal journals on the very top of one of my high book shelves and totally forgotten about them.

My thoughts: what in the hell am I going to do with all these journals? I'm sure as hell not going to let other people read them. But I don't want to get rid of them, either. I guess they're for later, when I want to go back and figure out what I did with my life.

At least they can't disappear like LJ can.

The grant draft came along beautifully, after much stressful struggle mid-to-late week. My mentor/boss wanted a draft a day, basically, and since he's trusting me to create something that he normally does himself, i can't fault him. I basically dropped almost everything to produce at something near the pace he needs, and by late Friday I had a good complete draft finished that really sings to me.

We'll see what he has to say about it on Monday. I really need to wade back into some of my other projects and go through the last 3 weeks of email tonight to see what I've missed. It's not nice to keep the people you care about waiting...I need a better system for this.

What about you? What drafts are you working on right now?

And hey, I've noticed that a couple of internet-based writers groups are being formed by people around me. You interested?

[jasminewind.livejournal.com]

Can you use this on a mac? I tried to download it and got an .exe file and don't know where to go from there. You might underestimate how foreign these sorts of things look to the not-tech savy. I was using dreamwidth to back up my jrl but with the queue delay, I'm looking for other options.

I'm with you Sabri, learning a new journal format is more than I'm interested in right now. I have backed up on DW but I don't journal there at all.

[maewyn]

You'll need to run the importer (in a few days, when it's available again) to import your journal contents -- you can choose to import journal entries, comments, tags, friends, icons, custom security groups (aka filters), or all of the above.

Here's the FAQ explaining how to set up crossposting for your future entries and a guide to Dreamwidth for LJ users, currently being revised & updated but still available.

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

Re: Dreamwidth posted this today :( When they open up imports again I will post instructions.

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

As a change agent, I should be cool with doing something new, but I love to stick with what feels good for as long as I can. I hate the thought that i need to learn a new program, start archiving, and maybe even leave LJ. Shudder...

Still, I think I'll get some help to try and run the ljarchive program (though I too have a mac), and then try the Dreamwidth import, too. I should have multiple copies...

Re: "where your soul lives"

[angiedub.livejournal.com]

http://nikflorida.org/ Entitled "Living with HIV (Angry)"

http://www.examiner.com/hiv-and-aids-in-orlando/hope-and-help-center-of-central-florida

These are links to the last 2 articles that I wrote. I'm working on an article on skin care and a follow up to the Orlando AIDSWalk from yesterday. I think I'll have them both out this week. This is the way I worked while attending college. Most of my writing and research was completed on days I attended school and was off from work.

The nikflorida.org is all right, but it required a lot more rewrite to produce that article than the first one. The "Angry" article started off as a rant. After sitting on it for a couple of days, I was able to objectify it, and came up with a much stronger article.

Is this the kind of stuff they're looking for?

Re: "where your soul lives"

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the links, honey. That makes it easy for me to check out your work.

The group(s) aren't looking for any style of work; they're looking for people who can read/encourage others to write and want their own drafts read/encouraged.

[the-smith-e.livejournal.com]

There was some suspicion of Russian government involvement but DDoS attacks in Russia are also a matter of extortion and are a worldwide problem.

Is the DDoS issue your primary concern?

[kmusser]

Sorry, I have no idea re a Mac, I used it on a PC.

Re: "where your soul lives"

[angiedub.livejournal.com]

Sounds good then. That's what I'm looking for. Encouragements is what I'm good at...for others. Not always so much for myself. :(