June 2003
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Feeds I Read

Restore a Radio weblog from a server backup. I'm working on a Radio UserLand Kick Start chapter about backing up a weblog and restoring it over a new installation of the software.

I ran into a Catch-22 problem: You can't restore a weblog without updating Radio.root so that it is current, and doing that prevents the weblog from being restored correctly.

As it turns out, Radio creates a new www/backups folder when Radio.root is updated. When you try to restore a weblog, Radio sees this folder and uses its files, rather than looking on the Web server for the last real backup.

To fix the problem, update Radio.root, delete the new www/backups folder, and then restore the weblog.

Note: All Radio users should turn on nightly backups that upstream to the Web server. Otherwise, there's no hope of using this feature after disaster strikes. [Rogers Cadenhead: Workbench: Radio Userland Kick Start]

 

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Installment Two: Software Stories. Mark Paschal says something about Radio® worth sharing:

Its magical self-healing properties are really a lack of fault tolerance: faults happen, so people complain it's broken, but then whatever temporary state causing the error goes away, and it "fixes itself." Magically breaking is no way for software to behave, unless you want to go insane.

I think that's what annoys me about Radio the most, but to move this to a more positive place, I thought I'd mention a few of my magical solutions to the problem of Radio not always shutting down properly. They don't always work, but they seem to make a difference. If they don't work for you, sorry, but I'm just another user grappling with bugs because I like the features.  Like Mark says, we're talkin' magic here...

• Before deleting a subscription, I delete all posts in the aggregator from that source.
   
• When I've deleted a lot of news items and/or subscriptions during a session, I manually clean out the trash in aggregator.root, and then compact data files before shutting down.  I'm not sure if compacting the files frequently can cause additional problems, so I do this sparingly.
   
• Under Preferences > Periodic updates, I've unchecked changes from Weblogs.com and update the Hotlist (and cleaned out certain data from those features' .root files) for two reasons.  I don't use them, and more important, they seem to more frequently generate macro errors when compacting data files than the other data files (followed by Radio not shutting down properly).

So, there you go, for what it's worth. I'm no expert and my solutions could be mere superstitions. But they keep me using the software...

Please note the above is opinion and conjecture and should not be considered reliable or taken as a suggested course of action, thank you. [jenett.radio] 

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