Importing

[gwyn]

So with all the "when in danger, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout"ing about deleting and importing LJ accounts, it's definitely prompted me to finally do the importing thing that I've avoided so long. I had planned a while ago to stop giving LJ my money anymore, but here's the thing I can't find information about:

Can I import only the stuff that wasn't originally posted at DW and thus crossposted to LJ? I don't want to overwrite the original DW post with the LJ post if I can avoid it, and it's one of the main reasons I've never done this. I have quite a few years of LJ before I started posting from DW and cross-posting to LJ. I'm afraid that if I overwrite all the original DW posts, I'll lose all those comments, won't I? I have, for years, had way more comments in DW to a post than to LJ.

Also, I'm assuming I will lose all my memories of my own LJ posts, the ones I saved for easy access, if LJ goes away? Is there actually a way to back up the memories? Because for a couple years I was doing a lot of usage and writing posts, and that was way before tags, and movie recs, and the only way I have of finding those is to use the memories section where I saved them all by title.

Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place but I can't see any of this being addressed. Also, I have no time, I'm on deadline and way behind on both my work projects, so…I guess this isn't happening right away.

Comments

[musesfool]

FOr similar reasons, I created a separate DW and imported my whole LJ into that, so the comments could be kept intact.

As far as I know, there's no way to import or download memories though.

[sholio]

It doesn't overwrite the comments to a crossposted entry, it combines them, so you have both the LJ and DW comments on one entry. I used to regularly back mine up, though I haven't in awhile.

The only thing that really makes the crossposter go haywire is changing one or both of your journal names. Then you end up with a ton of doubled entries. I changed my journal name back in 2011-ish and all my entries before that on DW are doubled. But otherwise it's pretty smart about merging them. It was designed to do so.

edit: unless the crossposter has been rewritten since I last backed up, which is possible, as I haven't done it in a couple of years.

[jenab]

Thank you for this information on different names when using the crossposter.

[sholio]

Sure! Though, to clarify, I mean changing your journal names after the link between your two accounts is already set up, not merely having different account names in the two places. My problem was that I had already run at least one import and started crossposting, and then I put in a rename token, and suddenly it failed to recognize that $OLDNAME and $NEWNAME were the same account, and imported all of my entries as duplicates.

[kore]

Yeah, this is what I see when people who get comments at both places, like sovay, regularly run imports -- the LJ comments show up but the DW ones are still there.

[monanotlisa]

"when in danger, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout"

Heh. Well. Yes.

[sperrywink]

Panicking is in my blood. *g*

Apparently you can import directly to your Dw journal without overwriting any content on Dw. As Sholio said, it just merges the comments.

I didn't know this, so I backed-up to a separate storage journal, but so it goes.

[darlulu.livejournal.com]

Is there actually a way to back up the memories?

If you find a way to do so, could you let me know? I've already imported my posts/comments to DW, but I don't see a way of importing my memories and that makes my heart hurt because I used the lj memory bank to store thousands of posts over the years. I really don't want to lose them all.

[destina.livejournal.com]

I imported my journal to shell journal on DW this morning as a backup and to see how it would work, and it went great - I didn't want to import it to the destina journal on DW until I saw what glitches might arise. It only took an hour, which isn't bad given that it had to import nearly 60,000 comments. Anecdotally, I read somewhere else that various people import their content regularly to DW, and it basically just imports comments on cross-posted posts. But I can't say for sure that's true, I obviously don't have a way to test it since I've never crossposted.

[carbonel]

I don't know any way to import memories, but I'll mention that there's a great LJ backup facility called LJarchive, just in case you didn't know.

http://www.memory-prime.de/lja/ljarchive_setup.zip

[trepkos.livejournal.com]

Cool - thanks! I used to have this, but lost it somehow.