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Ning Network Archive Diary

Welcome to My Ning Network Archive Project Diary. I am backing up my Network using this tool and I thought some of you may be interested in how the process is going. I have a very large network so if you do too this will give you a sense of what it could entail.

I will update with my experience in the comments. Feel free to leave any questions.

Video

My network has over 18k videos. I needed to get my 10k limit for archiving lifted. This was done simply by requesting this through a support ticket. Once I got confirmation I started my archiving. I needed to install Adobe Air and the Ning Archiver software. The great thing about this is it works 24/7. You can even resume downloads after a computer restart. I started my archiving on July 6, 2013 and as of today August 10 it is still archiving but it is pretty close to complete. I expect that it will be complete by tomorrow. So if you have about 10k videos you are looking at about 2 weeks of download time. All video content is downloaded as flash. You are warned to make sure you have enough space to store the files. A json file is downloaded separately and it contains all the video info including title, description, and comments. You will need a json interpreter to decipher the information in the json file. I was luckily able to find a free reader. To be continued. . .

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Permalink Reply by Friends of musicians on August 17, 2013 at 5:53pm

Hi Garfield, this is a very helpful and useful topic. I struggled with this archiving for a while in April- it always seemed to get 'stuck' and not indicate any progress. But if I left it for an additional night sometimes it finished. I only have 1,800 videos on my ning, yet it did indeed take a looong time. I don't even know what to do with a json file, but I archived them anyway. I bought a 2 TB external drive to house my archive off my computer, to save disc space.

To tell you the truth, archiving was such a tortuously slow ordeal that once I got my mostly completye April archive, I haven't updated it since. :( Yet. BUT, i do religiously download my member info spreadsheet almost every week, because I feel that having my 4000 members' email addresses is probably more important than anything else, to be able to contact them if Ning suddenly disappears down a black hole or something... (perish the thought!)

I'll be interested in keeping up with this thread if you add more to it as you go along. For sure the Ning archiver has been a challenge for more folks than just me- i know Edie2k for one, was having a terrible time using it too.

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Permalink Reply by Garfield Creator on August 17, 2013 at 6:24pm

Thank you so much for your comment. It does take time and yet it is very important to do. The Archiver Ning provides is a free tool that we would be hard pressed to find a counterpart as integrated into the system.

If you are dealing with video then the format you will be downloading in is flv. You can use a free flv player to view them. I use the following. Sothink FLV Player. There are plenty of options though.

In regards to a JSON Viewer I am using the following Json Viewer. It works very well but you may need to make adjustments in the raw json to make it interpret the json. The software assists a little in being able to remove the few bits of characters that may be messing up the interpretation.

I have downloaded as much as I can with the Archiver and may need to manually download the few I was not able to. I am now moving this json info to excel so I can rename all the flvs to the appropriate video names using a bulk renamer software.

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Permalink Reply by El Surveyor on January 3, 2015 at 6:05pm

Hey garfield,

I was wondering if you had any experience changing the json for videos into another format. for example, i'd like to take my archived json for videos and change it to a blog json format...

just wanted to know if you had tried something like this before i go into surgery...