Skip to main content

A module to back up data from Quora.

Project description

============
quora-backup
============

A syncing approach to backing up Quora answers, questions, votes, and follows. Rather than fetching your entire history of Quora activity all at once, quora-backup checks your recent Quora activity and saves only the new entries. **Run it regularly to maintain a full backup.** This not only allows backups to be performed faster and more frequently, but also makes less requests to Quora's servers and doesn't face request rate-limiting issues like some older backup techniques do. It supports backing up to **JSON and CSV**. More file formats and databases to come.

Installation
============
You will need [Python 2](https://www.python.org/download/). [pip](http://pip.readthedocs.org/en/latest/installing.html) is recommended for installing dependencies.

$ git clone https://github.com/csu/quora-backup.git
$ cd quora-backup
$ pip install -r requirements.txt

Installing without git
----------------------
For the less technical users who want to use quora-backup without installing git:

1. [Download quora-backup](https://github.com/csu/quora-backup/archive/master.zip) and extract the files from the `.zip` archive
2. Open a terminal or command prompt window and enter the folder using `cd`
3. Run `pip install -r requirements.txt` (after installing Python and pip)

Usage
=====

$ python backup.py Christopher-J-Su # defaults to flat-file json backups

To access the help for the options and arguments:

$ python backup.py --help
Usage: backup.py [OPTIONS] USER

Options:
-p, --path TEXT Specify a path at which to store the
backup files.
-t, --type [answers|questions|upvotes|question_follows]
Specify only one type of activity to be
backed up.
-f, --format [json|csv] Specify a format for the backup. Defaults
to JSON.
--help Show this message and exit. Show this message and exit.

Backup Formats
==============
To specify a format for your backup:

$ python backup.py --format csv Christopher-J-Su

For a list of available backup formats, read the help (see [Usage](#usage) section).

JSON Backup Details
-------------------
Your content will be stored in the following files, in whatever directory you run the above command in:

answers.json
questions.json
upvotes.json
question_follows.json

CSV Backup Details
------------------
Your content will be stored in the following files, in whatever directory you run the above command in:

answers.csv
questions.csv
upvotes.csv
question_follows.csv

The resulting CSV output will have columns (fields/attributes) delimited by commas and rows (entries) delimited by new lines. The first row will be a header row, containing the names of the fields.

Specifying an Activity
======================
You can also specify only one activity to be backed up. For instance, to only back up answers:

$ python backup.py --type answers Christopher-J-Su

Project details


Download files

Download the file for your platform. If you're not sure which to choose, learn more about installing packages.

Source Distribution

quorabackup-0.1.8.tar.gz (14.9 kB view hashes)

Uploaded Source

Supported by

AWS AWS Cloud computing and Security Sponsor Datadog Datadog Monitoring Fastly Fastly CDN Google Google Download Analytics Microsoft Microsoft PSF Sponsor Pingdom Pingdom Monitoring Sentry Sentry Error logging StatusPage StatusPage Status page