Difference between revisions of "Talk:Windows Live Spaces"

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(Changed 0001-1000 range size and changed status)
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|Auguste has downloaded ~580 Spaces as of 20 March.
|Auguste has downloaded ~580 Spaces as of 20 March.
ersi thinks he got the complete shabang.
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|[http://pastebin.com/xrXfPbL4 wls 1001-2000.txt]
|[http://pastebin.com/xrXfPbL4 wls 1001-2000.txt]

Revision as of 20:34, 20 March 2011

Current Status

D-Day has been and gone, and as of March 20, 2011, Windows Live Spaces is still running. There are still millions of Spaces that have not been downloaded or migrated. Microsoft could shut down WLS at any moment and delete all the data, so we need as many people as possible to help download them all. As of March 2 2011, only 1,000,000 Spaces had been migrated to Wordpress,[1] so we have a lot of catching up to do.

Phase 1: CID Scraping

NovaKing is currently scraping Bing for more profiles. At the rate he's been going, he should have tens of thousands ready soon, which will be split up into hotlists and allocated to volunteers for downloading.

Phase 2: Downloading Hotlists

This is a list of available hotlists and their status. They are generally split into chunks of 1,000 Spaces.

If you would like to take ownership of one, speak to Auguste on IRC. Volunteers, please update this table as soon as you are finished, or let Auguste know if you are unable to complete it.

Filename Owner Size (GB) Status Status notes
wls 0001-1000.txt Auguste, Dr-Spangle, ersi 13.7~ GB Complete Auguste has downloaded ~580 Spaces as of 20 March.

ersi thinks he got the complete shabang.

wls 1001-2000.txt Auguste, Dr-Spangle In progress Auguste has downloaded ~580 Spaces as of 20 March.
wls 2001-2202.txt Auguste, Dr-Spangle In progress Auguste has downloaded ~580 Spaces as of 20 March.
wls 2203-3000.txt Hydruh In progress
wls 3001-4000.txt Jeroenz0r, joeyh Complete joeyh has already downloaded the whole hotlist using multiple instances of Wget

Instructions

You have two options:

  • SpaceInvader2.pl
    • Downloads the list of Spaces, one Space at a time, using Wget. You probably want this one.
    • Usage: SpaceInvader2.pl "HOTLIST"
  • SpaceInvaderTurbo.pl
    • Spawns multiple instances of Wget to download everything at once. If you have a hotlist of 1,000 Spaces, this means 1,000 instances of Wget, all downloading simultaneously. This may be unfriendly to both your CPU and Microsoft's systems, but it will cut a 7-day job down to a few hours. Use it at your own risk.
    • Usage: SpaceInvaderTurbo.pl "HOTLIST"

Due to insufficient time and planning, these scripts don't download any off-site dependencies - most of what you download will be HTML/text. The upside is that it compresses nicely.

Once you have finished downloading a hotlist, please update your details in the above table and compress all the Spaces into a single archive. 7-Zip on maximum compression should be able to get them down to ~10% of their original size. Once storage is confirmed, we'll have you upload them.

Phase 3: Storage

TBA.

Other Tools

Though Perl/Wget is the recommended method for archiving Spaces, there are a couple of other tools available.

HTTrack (graphic version)

I will explain what is the procedure to download one or more Spaces using HTTrack graphic version (WinHTTrack in Windows and in Linux is called WebHTTrack).

I assume that the reader should be familiarized with the use of WinHTTrack (or WebHTTrack) so I'll just explain that you need configure (in the Option Panel of the program) to download a Space of Windows Live Spaces. If you do not know how to use this program you can check this tutorial (in English) or this one (in Spanish).

In the section "Scan Rules" must be added the following lines:

+*.css +*.js -ad.doubleclick.net/* -mime:application/foobar
+*.7z
+*.pdf +*.doc +*.mid +*.3gp +*.djvu +*.amr +*.mp4 +*.ogg +*.ogv +*.ogm
+*.mov +*.mpg +*.mpeg +*.avi +*.asf +*.mp3 +*.mp2 +*.rm +*.wav +*.vob +*.qt +*.vid +*.ac3 +*.wma +*.wmv
+*.zip +*.tar +*.tgz +*.gz +*.rar +*.z
+*.arj +*.dar +*.lzh +*.lz +*.lza +*.arc
+*.gif +*.jpg +*.png +*.tif +*.bmp
-*.entry#comment
+*.profile.live.com/Lists/*
+*.byfiles.storage.live.com/*
+*.photos.live.com
+*.spaces.live.com
  • Line 1 to 7 indicate what types of files are downloaded from a Space (if the program finds one these and this lines can be modified to suit the user).
  • Line 8 is because the program tries to capture the comments any post of a blog on Windows Live Spaces and this action generates errors (in addition to a waste of time when exploring a site).
  • Line 9 and 12 are used to capturing Spaces of the list of "friends" who might have the Space user which is capturing at that time (these lines are optional)
  • Lines 10 and 11 are to capture the files and photos that the user can have uploaded there.

I'm not sure the data in *.photos.live.com will continue to exist after Windows Live Spaces is shut down, so I took the opportunity to save any photos in this there anyway. If you don't want to save photos, that line is optional.

Finally add in the field Browser "Identity" (from the section Browser ID) the following User Agent:

Googlebot/2.1 (+ http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)

LSSaver

Some of the descriptions in this section was taken from http://www.softsea.com/review/LSSaver.html

LSSaver is a Windows Freeware software to save an Windows Live Space blog to your local disk. It saves useful informations such as, blog title, content and comments. It is able to save the pictures included in the blog to local disk also.

LSSaver is very simple to use, so that its operation is:

  • First, you need to enter a Microsoft Live Space username.
  • Then, you click on the "Get" button to retrive all blog entries. This operation may take up to several minutes depending on the number of entries that contains a blog, as well the user connection, when a blog entry is retrieved, it's title will appear in the tree which is the left part of the window. Wait until all titles are trieved. Then you can browse your blog titles by fold/unfold tree, check those you want to save. Once a blog entry is checked, it's content will appear on the right part of the window, check all blogs you want to save and wait until all of them appear.
  • To save the selected blogs, you simply click the Save button, a file selection window will open, select where the files will be saved and give a file name and click the Save button on the window, after a while, all the selected blogs are saved. The saved file is a HTML file, you can open it with a browser.

The program works as it should but we must take into consideration some details that differentiate it from any web site downloader:

  • As explained before, when the program save a blog all the articles (and comments) are crammed into an HTML file (which could become a problem if the blog has a lot of content).
  • The names of the images are stored as 000001, 000002, etc. thus avoiding that the original can be found on the Internet (this refers to the images of external sites linked in a blog) or recognize the file format.

Useful links

References