Quora Backup

Note: parts of this script may be broken due to changes on Quora's end. Please open issues and make pull requests regarding this at csu/pyquora.

A syncing approach to backing up Quora answers, questions, votes, and follows. Rather than fetching your entire history of Quora activity all at once, quora-backup checks your recent Quora activity and saves only the new entries. Run it regularly to maintain a full backup. This not only allows backups to be performed faster and more frequently, but also makes less requests to Quora's servers and doesn't face request rate-limiting issues like some older backup techniques do. It supports backing up to JSON and CSV. More file formats and databases to come.

Table of Contents

• Installation
• Usage
  • Backup Formats
  • Specifying an Activity

Installation

You will need Python 2. pip is recommended for installing dependencies.

$ git clone https://github.com/csu/quora-backup.git
$ cd quora-backup
$ pip install -r requirements.txt

Installing without git

For the less technical users who want to use quora-backup without installing git:

1. Download quora-backup and extract the files from the .zip archive

2. Open a terminal or command prompt window and enter the folder using cd

3. Run pip install -r requirements.txt (after installing Python and pip)

Usage

$ python backup.py Christopher-J-Su  # defaults to flat-file json backups

To access the help for the options and arguments:

$ python backup.py --help
Usage: backup.py [OPTIONS] USER

Options:
  -p, --path TEXT                 Specify a path at which to store the backup
                                  files.
  -t, --type [answers|questions|upvotes|user_follows|review_requests]
                                  Specify only one type of activity to be
                                  backed up.
  -f, --format [json|csv|mongodb]
                                  Specify a format for the backup. Defaults to
                                  JSON.
  -m, --mongodburi TEXT           Specify a MongoDB URI. If not specified,
                                  tries localhost.
  --help                          Show this message and exit.

Backup Formats

To specify a format for your backup:

$ python backup.py --format csv Christopher-J-Su

For a list of available backup formats, read the help (see Usage section).

JSON Backup Details

Your content will be stored in the following files, in whatever directory you run the above command in:

answers.json
questions.json
upvotes.json
user_follows.json
review_requests.json

CSV Backup Details

Your content will be stored in the following files, in whatever directory you run the above command in:

answers.csv
questions.csv
upvotes.csv
user_follows.csv
review_requests.csv

The resulting CSV output will have columns (fields/attributes) delimited by commas and rows (entries) delimited by new lines. The first row will be a header row, containing the names of the fields.

Specifying an Activity

You can also specify only one activity to be backed up. For instance, to only back up answers:

$  python backup.py --type answers Christopher-J-Su