Should gpodder.net be supported long term?

Project management
21

Do you mean the exported databases? Yes. They are saved on the sd card and if you factory reset, the sd is probably included. The idea is to copy the file to your pc.

22

Not having sync has been bugging me, so I finally got around to setting up my own personal gpodder online service. I got it deployable on Dokku and made a repo with code and instructions that hopefully other people can use to set up their own instances. It’s a lot easier than deploying a Django project from scratch, though it still requires some understanding of servers and how to use a command line.

I do think keeping sync functionality is valuable, despite the sad decline of gpodder.net. Other posters have touched on some of the reasons sync is useful, but I want to restate them all in one place. I think of it as three distinct needs, all of which gpodder sync does a pretty good job of addressing:

  1. Sync - Keeping state in sync between multiple clients. I sync podcasts between the gPodder client on my computer and AntennaPod on my phone, but this could also be between a phone and a tablet, or multiple phones, or even multiple clients on the same device. This is the bread and butter of gpodder sync, so it’s no surprise it excels at this use case.
  2. Backup - The situation backups should always address is “what if my device dies suddenly and without warning?” Doing a manual backup of the AntennaPod database is fine if you’re doing a planned upgrade, but if your phone suddenly self-destructs (as multiple Google phones have done to me) or if you drop it while skydiving or whatever, you’d better have automated backups. Having spent a bunch of time trying to automate backups of my Signal messages, I can tell you that getting a regular offsite backup of a file from the Android filesystem is not easy to set up and frustratingly prone to silently failing.
  3. Portability - I want to know that I can take my data with me if I want to move to another service. I always prefer software that have clear import and export paths, and sync provides an acceptable version of that. Portability is not only a reassurance that I could move to a different client entirely, but that my data exists in a format that will be resilient to things like different versions of an app. For example, I’ve had problems in the past where an older Android phone stopped receiving updates to an app, and then upon upgrading to a new phone, the newer version of the app couldn’t read the system files from the older version.
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23

This is the point I wanted to make. I think two things are being mashed together that are related but separate. Backup, which allows you to recover from a failure or device switch. Sync witch would allow multi devices to be used to listen to podcasts able to appear to be one device.

I would love to see these things be separate options. so if we could get say backup on schedule or change that would be great. Also I would love to see see some options for sync. I have very little faith in gpodder at the moment. I turned of failure notifications for sync.

I wish I was not a horrible coder, and had some money to help.

24

You can already export databases in settings to make a backup. I agree with you to have an option to schedule it would be a good idea and it has been asked with issue 1899 which is from 2016 :worried:

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That issue 1889 is about backup of the settings to google, I think we need a new Github issue for schedule backup of the data

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26

Ha I thought it was not specific to google. As soon as I can and if nobody else already did it I will create an issue asking for that.

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Thanks @iangreenleaf for that overview of use-cases. Really helpful! I hope that for the less tech-savvy someone will soon implement FeedDirectory.org as a possible alternative for gpodder.net

Re auto-backup on GitHub:

  • 1899 is confusing to be honest. We should update the title to reflect the Google nature of it. But actually I’m wondering if we shouldn’t close it, given that for many users the AP database will be too big to sync with Google’s service. @ByteHamster?
  • 4850 talks of backup improvements, including automation. In fact I think it is only about auto-backup, and it’s title should be updated to reflect that.
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28

What we could store is the list of subscriptions, so that at least some data is stored automatically for users who don’t enable sync.

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