Backing up

It's taken me a day or two longer than expected but it's now done.  The result is an application called BackBlip which will backup your Blipfoto journal to your local hard drive.  I apologise for the delay but 4 days is pretty short lead-time really :-)

After testing by a number of different users I am pleased to report that Backblip is now available for download from http://www.gp-it.co.uk/backblip/backblip.exe (case sensitive)

The file is an installer that will put all the files in the right place and create a shortcut in the start menu.  Unfortunately it only works on Windows but will run on a Mac under Parallels or Bootcamp.  It has been tested on Win7 and XP but I haven't got Win 8/10 to test it against.   If you don't have a Windows PC,  perhaps you can get a friend to run it for you and give you the data files it produces.  It is compact enough to run from a memory stick USB drive.

Operation should be pretty self explanatory.   The idea of this version is to get all your data and pictures downloaded onto your local PC.  The data is stored in an XML file which is not very user friendly but this is only the first step.  A future version of BackBlip will allow you to browse the downloaded files and images and save them in various more friendly formats.

The data is saved to your pictures folder under the folder BackBlip/<your user name>.  You will find the XML file there.  If you double click it you should be able to view it in Internet explorer.   It contains all the data from your journal except comments.  The images and thumbnails are in two subdirectories .  A future version may get comments as well but I need to test that it doesn't overload the server.   I have had to slow down the speed it downloads images for this reason.  It took about 40 minutes to download 844 entries in my journal.

Sorry I haven’t yet had time to write better instructions.

Please try it and let me know of any problems.  Due to the haste in getting it out there are almost certainly some bugs but it seems pretty robust.

Under the terms of the EULA it is freeware and you are free to pass it on to other users.  Please tell other Blippers about it if you like it.  

PS it will crash if your journal is protected.  The next version will hopefully have a fix for this.  In the meantime you can get round it by temporarily  disabling your protection while downloading your journal.