On June 21 I set up the auto-archiving on both my main microblog and 100 Days of Blog. Both repositories have a Readme so they are not empty; both are public and I went through the authentication setup via Design > Github repository; yet neither have backed up.
I reviewed the documentation which says they should back up about once a week. I’m wondering if I missed a step or there is some other issue?
I’m feeling more itchy about this especially when we have multi-hour outages like tonight. I’d really like to get these automated backups working. Can anyone give me any ideas of what the issue might be? As I’ve said: the repo is public, it isn’t empty, and I’ve authenticated my Github account with my micro.blog one for each repo.
Is there a file with the suffix .json in your backup? If so, that is the backup of your blog posts.
No, as noted in the original post of this issue: nothing has backed up at all since I set this up on June 21st
I asked because I was looking for markdown files in my own backup when there was a json file. I’d contact support directly. Maybe tag the relevant people here as well. It did take a couple weeks for my backups to start, but my experience means nothing in this regard.
@anniegreens I checked your setting and it looks like the repository had a space at the beginning that I suspect was interfering with the upload. I’ll updated it and will initiate a backup so we can see if it starts working.
I’m also fixing this so that spaces won’t trip it up in the future.
Even with the GitHub backup working, I also recommend occasionally doing a manual upload from the export options under Posts → “…” → Export. The GitHub backup is a little simplified. It has all your posts and photos, but the other exports are easier to work with in some ways.
Well, that’s unfortunate. I thought I copy/pasted the repository names into a text editor specifically to strip any characters or formatting before putting into the field in MB. Thanks for checking that out. It looks like my other one had a leading space as well, so the main microblog has now backed up and I will check that the other one does now that I’ve removed that errant space.
Thanks. I think I’ve seen a space introduced during the actual paste by macOS, even if only the exact text was copied. I’ve got this fixed for the next update to Micro.blog, so shouldn’t be a problem going forward.
I just meant it was unfortunate I introduced this issue and couldn’t figure out what was wrong and had to ask here, not that you or Micro.blog did anything wrong. Appreciate you looking into it, backups are happening on both blogs now.
To be honest, the auto backup never worked for my blog.
I wonder if the Design page itself is broken a bit, because nothing actually happens as I type anything in the field for the repo name.
The help page includes the following paragraph:
To enable GitHub archiving, click on Posts → Design and enter a GitHub repository name. Only include the repository name, not a full URL. When you save your blog settings, Micro.blog will prompt you to sign in to your GitHub account.
Well, I’ve never seen such a popup and I don’t understand how to invoke it. My browser doesn’t block any tabs.
I think there may have been a GitHub change that made this documentation out of date. Testing right now, what I’m seeing is that if you already signed in to your GitHub account, it won’t prompt you, it will just redirect back to the Micro.blog Design page. Behind the scenes it will have saved your info, though, which I’ve confirmed by checking your account.
However, I can see in the log for your account that it’s getting an error when trying to upload to GitHub. Does the ymolodtsov/blog exist? And is it an initialized repository? Those are common problems that will prevent things from working.
I’ve tried setting up a new empty repo just to check.
I think it’d be great to leave a note explaining the right syntax for the required entry in the “GitHub repository” field (whether it should include the user name, etc). Otherwise, there’s no way to know if it worked (until you see the backup happening).
I agree, it can be confusing to troubleshoot. The repo field can include the username or not, Micro.blog will handle both cases.
I don’t think the repo can be empty. Did you initialize it with a README or LICENSE?
Just made a new repo, initialized it with a README and pasted the URL into that field.
It prompted me to permit microdotblog to access the repo and now I have a bunch of files in my repo.
