I agree with the first of these points. As for the second (about the format of the download file), I’m more satisfied than Ed is.
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Re Ed’s point a (automating the backup download)
The excellent service that I use to host solutions for my FileMaker clients (a place called FileMaker Hosting Pros) makes daily backups and retains them for a while, in case I want to download one. But it also allows me to setup automatic downloads of backup files to my Dropbox account. This is an excellent option. They build this into their pricing structure, but I understand that this would increase traffic on Coda’s servers and if Coda needed to charge a little extra for this option, I’d be willing to pay for it. I should add: I’ve not played with Coda’s integration with Dropbox yet. For all I know, this may be something I can do myself. (That would be awesome.)
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Re Ed’s point b (limitations in the format of the data dump)
I just tried the Coda “download my data” feature. Works much like Google’s Takeout feature. For those who haven’t tried it, the download file is named coda-data-export.zip and it contains mostly text files with meaningless names, and a couple of JSON files.
My only complaint is with the name of the output file. It really needs to be timestamped: not coda-data-export.zip but 20200131-coda-export.zip.
Otherwise, all things considered, I think they’ve done a pretty good job.
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For those who have not tried the Coda export yet…
The text files have meaningless names representing (I assume) doc IDs. But one of the JSON files (“doc-manifest.json”) is an index that identifies which of your Coda docs each text file comes from. For example, line 8 of the manifest for my download reads
8 "MgU2ByUPSV": "FileMaker alternatives"
where “FileMaker alternatives” is my name for one of my Coda docs. So you can translate the meaningless names into something meaningful pretty easily. Well done there.
When I open file MgU2ByUPSV.txt up in a text editor like Sublime Text, what I see was surprising but, if I’m honest, kind of impressive. It’s an entirely readable plain-text rendition of my entire document. Entirely readable! That is, I can read not only any normal text that I’d entered on the canvas but can also see the data in any tables and/or views. The parts of this output file that represent data in a table are tab-delimited. I was able to copy a table, paste into Sublime Text, save as “alternatives.tab”, then open in another database app without a problem.
The other JSON file in the download zip file is a JSON list of my users. Perfect.
Every technological decision “leaves something to be desired”, at least that’s my experience. But all things considered, Coda’s formatting of the data dump strikes me as a pretty intelligent compromise. It does remind me that I should make sure in future to have one section of each doc that contains NOTHING or almost nothing but an unfiltered data table (which was clear to me even before I tried this export process).
It might be nice if Coda offered alternative forms of download: CSV or JSON output of base tables (not views). But if they have to limit us to one option, I think what they’ve done is a pretty good compromise.
My two cents.
William