quorabackup 0.1.8

A module to back up data from Quora.

============
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