What about data integrity? (And hi, I'm new!)

[David Archer]

Hi everyone,

After a long, very interesting journey to search for the best way to gather my thoughts as I continue a lifelong vocation, I'm a new TiddlyWiki user. I've been using TW5 for about a month with a local file.

Now I want to create a new TW as a static site online to do some work and unfinished writing in public. I want the layout to be more intuitive to those who aren't wikiers, so I've been looking at Drift, which I've seen mentioned here.

Whatever the theme or plugins used, I want this wiki to last forever.

But I'm not a programmer. 

Let's say I use Drift (or Stroll or any other modded version) to start this up. Then I build a large body of work, say 100s of tiddlers all cross-linked beautifully. I backup my site regularly, and everything's great. And then for some reason I find I need to change to another version of TW, or remove plugins, etc. Is my essential data (the tiddlers, their content and their links) still safe? I.e., is it transferrable to another TW file?

Thanks for any thoughts about this. And mega credit goes to the Ness Labs blog and Anne-Laure Le Cunff for getting me started.

David

[Ste]

Yes.

Your essential data would be just fine.  Stroll drift etc do amazing and clever things with layout and with your tiddlers, but they don't fundamentally change your wiki.  Obviously if you moved your stuff to an empty wiki you would lose some of the functions you have with drift/ stroll and any other tweaks you have made but your tiddelrs would all be present and correct.

[Mat]

David Archer wrote:

Is my essential data (the tiddlers, their content and their links) still safe? I.e., is it transferrable to another TW file?

Data content and links are still safe and transferrable, yes. Plugins or other code that is not part of the core, especially things that are not developed by the core team, might depend on other code so it can be that they don't function properly. But that is not your data. Further, because this is just a html file, your data is actually possible to read in plain text. It is surrounded by html, but it's there and it's extractable. It is probably one of the safest solutions around in this regard.

<:-)

[David Archer]

That's terrific, thanks, both of you. I'll be less afraid of breaking things now.

[Charlie Veniot]

G'day David, and welcome to TiddlerHood!

Although you may never need them, there's is nothing wrong with having just enough paranoia to create backups once in a while (at any moment you think: "man, it would really suck if what I'm about to do would screw up X hours worth of effort I've just put in).

I have my regular moments of:  "hmmm, just when everything seems foolproof, I am about to step up as the latest posterboy for fools are us." 

Cheers !

[David Archer]

Thank you! Glad to be here.

"Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean you're wrong." comes to mind when talking about losing data. ;) I totally agree - good tip.