Thread: RSS reader backup
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artkavanagh is offline artkavanagh
2007-02-24 , 08:57
Posts: 92 | Thanked: 2 times | Joined on Feb 2007 @ Toulouse, France
#1
A day or two ago, for the second time since I got my N800 three weeks ago, I found that all my feeds had disappeared. According to the applet on the home screen and the RSS reader itself, I had subscribed to 0 feeds and they had never been refreshed. Once I'd reconstructed my list of feeds, I decided that I'd better back it up to avoid this happening again.

For those who, like me, aren't all that proficient in the use of command-line tools, I thought it might be useful to describe what I did. (This will be old hat to veterans of the 770 but I'm guessing that the release of the N800 will have brought in a fair number of new users who haven't yet found their way around the file system.) The file that needs to be backed up is "feedlist.opml" and it's in a hidden subdirectory of your user directory, "/home/user/.osso_rss_feed_reader". To back the file up, do the following:

1. Start a terminal window. You should be in /home/user but if you're in any doubt the pwd (print working directory) command will verify this.

2. Enter

cp ./.osso_rss_feed_reader/feedlist.opml ./MyDocs/.documents

at the command prompt. This will put a copy of the feeds list in "Documents", where it is visible to the File Manager, with which you can move/copy it to your SD card in case, for example, you want to import the list into a reader on another computer.

3. If you're unlucky enough to need to restore your feeds list, first close the RSS reader, then

cp -f ./MyDocs/.documents/feedlist.opml ./.osso_rss_feed_reader

should overwrite the empty or damaged list file with the backup.

I'd be curious to know if anybody has any idea why the feeds seem to be prone to disappear. I opened feedlist.opml after this happened for the second time, and the <body> element was empty (in fact, I think it just consisted of "<body/>").

The other thing I wanted to ask is whether anybody can suggest any other files that it would be worthwhile to backup in this way?

Thanks,

Art