dw_maintenance | (no subject)

As part of the current geopolitical crisis caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, rumors are circulating that the Russian government intends to withdraw from the internet so that sites hosted inside Russia won't be accessible from outside Russia. We don't have any information about the credibility of these rumors, and I personally believe it's 50/50 odds at best that it's true, but the rumor has prompted many people from LJ to back up their journals and communities to Dreamwidth, using our content importer, in the interests of preserving access to their data if the rumors are true. Because LiveJournal is hosted inside Russia, if the rumors do turn out to be true, no one outside Russia will be able to reach it, so people are highly motivated to import their stuff right now!

As we've noted in the last few posts, LiveJournal is intermittently blocking our access to their servers, so there's a chance any import attempt might fail. Many imports are successfully finishing today, though, and we're doing everything we can to keep that success percentage high. If yours fails, you'll get a message in your Dreamwidth inbox. If you get any failure message at all, wait 30 minutes and try the import again, starting from the step it failed on.

In order to increase the chance the importer stays unlocked for as long as possible, crossposting is still shut off (there's a whole tl;dr here about why imports are more likely to succeed than crossposting, but I'm typing on my phone so you will be spared my usual earnest explanation). Please also help us reduce the risk of tripping LJ's "automated" blocks by making absolutely 100% certain the LJ password you're entering when you set up the import is the correct password for the LJ account you're importing. All of the import jobs appear to LJ like they come from Dreamwidth, not your computer, and the fewer failed logins LJ sees from us, the less often they block us.

We've temporarily increased the server resources assigned to the importer in hopes of working through the queue more quickly during periods we aren't blocked. For the next several days (or as long as we can) this may cause the site to feel a bit sluggish at times of higher usage: pages may take a tiny bit longer to load and emails may take a few extra minutes to arrive, especially during the US evening hours. (So, from about 8PM in EDT, GMT -5, to about 10PM in PDT, GMT -8.)

We will be carefully monitoring the server load, and we'll throw some more temporary resources at the problem if we need to. Please bear with us for a few days as we try our absolute best to help as many people as possible back up their data just in case!

(Welcome to all our new friends! We're glad you're here. It is usually much, much more chill than this.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Thank you so much for your steadfast support and concern!

Just checking: I imported most of my LJ over here a while back, but have continued crossposting. If I re-import now, would that start over from scratch, or just bring in the newer LJ comments on my crossposts?

I don't want to endanger my archived posts!

My huge problem is that many hundreds of photos that now appear on my DW are linked to my old photo archive on LJ. I take they'll all disappear when LJ goes down? Is there any way to transfer my photo archive? Other than downloading from LJ one by one, uploading here, and relinking?

Many thanks.

Edited 2022-03-11 00:19 (UTC)

For images, this is the download method I used. In terms of relinking, I don't know of any way to do that automatically, but my plan is, if necessary, to search my journal for "pics.livejournal.com" and use the file names to match up and reupload as needed.

As long as you continued posting to LJ using our crossposter, another import will just magically fill in the comments from the LJ version of the post on the DW version of the post!

Sadly, we don't have an easy way to import images from LJ's Scrapbook: the API that LiveJournal provides and we use for importing doesn't include Scrapbook. There are various unofficial methods floating around for at least downloading your Scrapbook images to your computer to back them up; aside from that, yeah, sadly you'll have to do it manually. I'm sorry!

Thank you so much for reassuring me!

I am soldiering on downloading manually. I hope I can finish in time.

Nine

If you have a Windows computer, Semagic does work to download scrapbook photos. It was janky, but I got most of my 12k+ photos downloaded from scrapbook last weekend. Since LJ seems to be still up, it might be worth a try. Though you will have to upload here, you'll at least have them.

Oooh, I forgot that Semagic can download your Scrapbook images for you! (I'm Mac-only.) I will remember to mention that when people ask, thank you.

Glad to help! :) If people run into errors, they should just keep trying as that's what worked for me. My biggest suggestion is to rename any album titles to remove special characters in case Windows can't turn it into a folder - which breaks the download.