Backups at a glance
Parseh keeps four shelves of your own, and each has a pair of buttons on its own page: one that downloads the whole shelf as a single zip, and one that puts such a zip back. Nothing else is needed to move your work to another computer, or to keep a copy of it somewhere safe.
1. The four shelves#
| Shelf | Where the buttons are | Back it up |
|---|---|---|
| Books | the books’ library, /books/, panel ⇩ The whole shelf | Backup every book |
| Videos | the video index, /youtube/, panel ⇩ The whole shelf | Backup every video |
| Studio documents | the studio’s library, /studio/, at the top | Backup |
| Exercise decks | the exercise decks, /exercises/, at the top | Backup |
Beside each of them, on every shelf, is Load from backup, which puts such a zip back.
A backup is an ordinary download: the browser saves it where it saves everything. While the server packs it — a shelf of narrated books can take a while — the Working… indicator says so, on that page and on the hub, and it does the same while a backup goes back up.
2. What each one holds#
| Shelf | The backup holds | It leaves out |
|---|---|---|
| Books | one bundle per book, each the book’s everything but the recording zip: its text and chapters, its notes, its timings and alignment | the recordings themselves, audio/ |
| Videos | one bundle per video: its glossed transcript, its notes, and a film of your own with it | nothing: a YouTube video never had a file here, only its address |
| Studio documents | every document with its record — its id, its tags, its dates — its pictures and recordings, and its built PDF | nothing |
| Exercise decks | every deck with its own id, its settings, every picture and recording it has, and its scheduling — every answer you ever gave | nothing |
A book’s recordings are left out to keep the backup small: a narration is hundreds of megabytes. Copy each book’s audio/ folder yourself; after restoring the backup, put it back under books/<language>/<slug>/ and build that book again — the build button on its card on the library page (rebuild, for a book that already has a reader), or rebuild the reader in the reader — and the recording plays again. Its timings came back with the book, so it is aligned as before. A single book can also be downloaded with its recording, as all of it, from its reader.
A shelf of books or of videos is a zip of zips: each inside is the very bundle one book or one video downloads as, so a backup can be taken apart and a single book put back by itself, through the Bring a book back panel beside the shelf’s (Bring a video back for a video).
3. Putting one back#
What is already there is kept, and named. Loading a backup never quietly overwrites something newer: a book, a video, a document or a deck that is already on the shelf is left as it is, the page says which (the studio, how many), and only then offers to replace it — Replace them or Keep mine, on every shelf. A backup is usually older than what you have, and a restore is not a merge.
It comes back as itself. A document keeps its id and the links that point at it, a deck keeps its scheduling, so what you restore carries on where it was. In the studio, where a link names the document it leads to, two documents cannot share a name: a document coming back under a name another one already has opens This name is already in use. Rename the one already there, the one coming back, or both, and press Use these names — every link to a renamed document follows it to its new name — or Cancel, and nothing is restored.
An exercise deck’s backup is not its Export. A deck’s own Export ▾, on its page (or in the ⋯ menu of its card on the decks page), is for giving a deck away: Without scheduling leaves the answers behind so that whoever gets it starts new, and it carries only the pictures and recordings its exercises name. The backup is for keeping: the deck comes back as the same deck, with every file it had and every answer.
4. What no backup holds#
- The Anki card store,
youtube/anki/: your cards go to Anki and come back from it through the ⇆ Anki door. - The clip tray: the recordings and pictures waiting for a card. A card, a deck or a document that uses one keeps its own copy.
- The dictionaries, sentences and models fetched on Settings → Reading help: fetch them again there.
- Your settings and the devices you let in,
config/: a Parseh on another computer starts with its own, and a phone is let in there once more. The chunks you flagged to review later and the names you gave the levels live there too, inconfig/prefs.json, beside the places you were reading. A LaTeX theme travels on its own: Export on Settings → LaTeX drawings, and Import a theme… on the other computer. - The TeX packages Parseh got,
texmf/: get them again on Settings → LaTeX drawings. - Speech to text’s program and models,
stt/: gigabytes of other people’s work; get them again on Settings → Speech to text. - The ARASAAC pictograms,
arasaac/: some 160 MB of other people’s pictures, under a licence that asks for a credit; get them again on Settings → Pictograms (ARASAAC). - What each browser remembers: the language, the sizes and the levels shown, the page zoom.
- What can be built again: the readers, the library page, the PDFs of the books, the LaTeX drawings (
markdown/latex/), made again from their blocks.
None of it is needed to update Parseh: an update from Settings keeps every shelf, and everything in this list, as it is. Where everything lives has the folders all of these are kept in.