Bruji

Dear All,

I'm sorry to begin my life in this forum posting a question that might have been discussed some times: I did a search and I couldn't find an answer, so...

The point is: I "published" my personal library in my website using export-to-web built in function. Meantime I upgraded to Lion and... forgot to backup my data. Is there a way to import back my library from the web? Of course I have full access to my webspace, and I already downloaded from my FTP the folder I created to export my library.

Thank you for any help!
Hileotech

Hi Hileotech,

That is actually quite a complicated question. Although the program make web pages out of your data, these pages are in a format that is great for viewing in a web browser but not great to be read by DVDpedia. DVDpedia does not have the option of importing those files as they can be in any number of varying templates that are used for HTML.

You would need to first pull out the most unique data out of those files to use in the add multiple window to re-import those entries from online. For example if all your entries have an ASIN then use a text editor and regular expressions to pull a list of ASINs that you can then copy/paste into the add multiple to add all those movies back. Lacking a unique id like ASIN or IMDb, the best option is to pull a list of titles. The following post has a little more about this same issue and how to structure a regular expression to match the part of the HTML that your looking for. You might need to use a program like TextWrangler that allows searching in multiple files at once if the template used does not include all the movies in a single HTML file.

Dear Conor,
thank you very much for your answer. I saw the post you pointed me to, and thought that, as Bookpedia itself "built" the HTML file, it would have been easier to re-import the list(s) into Bookpedia.
As I'm not so good with codes and HTML's things, I think I'll re-introduce one by one the books I lost...
Next time I'll take care of making a REAL backup before erasing my HDD...

PS: by the way: I just managed to move the default dB location from Library to Documents... I hope this will help when / if reinstalling OSX

Email me the HTML files and I can try to recover those books names for you, save you from typing in a lot of books title again. I don't need the covers that would make the attachment large. Look inside the exported folder and select all the files ending in .html and then use the "compress" command under the file menu to make a Archive.zip that you can attach to an email.

It is really very kind of you!
You can download the whole compressed file from http://www.macrobio.it/tmp/biblioteca.zip (with images) and/or http://www.macrobio.it/tmp/biblioteca_NO_IMG.zip (without images)

Anyway, please keep in mind that most part of those books were correctly imported through ISBN codes, so, please, don't feel obliged to help me!
Thanks!!!!

Thank you for the files. Unfortunately the export used did not include the ISBN information, but I did manage to pull out the title and the author and imported that to Bookpedia and then run a few through the gear button on the bottom right of the edit window via BOL IT to make sure I was getting results.

You can download Bookpedia exported file here. Unzip and double click to import as a new excluded collection called "Import". Here you can review the books and open the edit window and use the gear button mentioned above on the bottom right to select a few italian sites to gather more details, it''s better to do them one by one so that you can pick the right result if the site returns more than one result.

Some book titles have to many special characters in them like a colon that trow of searches on the online Italian databases so it might be easier to re-enter from a find a few of the books you can't find data for. As you go processing the books in the excluded collection drag them to your library to include them in your permanent collection. Once your done with the excluded collection and all the books you want are in your library you can remove the "imported" collection with the gray icon (meaning it's books are excluded from your overall library).