Keep Safe

We hope you will be collecting the best pages we have to offer and making some of your own to share. We especially want these pages to be something you keep forever. Now let's talk about how that is going to happen.

We save a site's pages as text. We will bundle these up for a whole site in what we call 'export' format. Retrieve an export of a site by directing your browser towards the export url and saving what you get back with your browser's Save As command.

Try it for this site right now. Click export and then Save As a file you can keep. export

Here is a later version of this page from Ward's forage site, with more recent thoughts: forage.ward.fed.wiki.org Save your wiki . . but the json export is the same as above.

If you got here from your own site as origin then you've just backed up your work. Try dragging the saved file back to this web page. It will show you what you can restore by forking pages from this backup.

We save every page you fork and every change you make as you make them. It is hard to lose your work if these saves are happening. They won't happen if you don't login or if you edit a site that you don't own and can't login. In this case we will save your changes in your browser's local storage.

Browser local storage is handy until you want to share. Others won't see what is in your browser. We warn you of this with the yellow border when your pages are saved in local storage. See Local Changes for a list of pages you have saved for this origin. Notice you can export them directly from the browser.

We call the site where you start browsing the federation your origin. It is where you load wiki and where your pages save when you own the site and log in.

If you forgot to login or if your login timed out then you will see yellow local pages pop up. Login and then fork the page back to your origin. The yellow disappears.

We make it easy for anyone to host wiki sites in what have come to be called 'wiki farms'. If you host a farm for your colleagues then you are promising to keep them safe, at least for a while. If you keep your pages on another person's farm then it is good to know how hard they are working to keeping your pages safe.

A host will pay to keep a server working and will lease the domain name under which farm sites all appear. If you're not sure how safe your pages are then save exports frequently. This saves the pages but not the domain name. You will be happier when you have your own domain name then you will have everything.

See Tips for Administrators where we talk about these hosting responsibilities and how to meet them.

A few secrets are kept on your behalf within status files on your site's host server. These are typically manufactured keys that enable server-side communication with the rest of the federation.

Human access to such keys is reserved to server administrators. This means that they can and you can't make copies and otherwise use these keys.

We want our best pages to last forever and we think that is going to happen. Experts agree that no digital media is going to last more than a decade or two so we're going to have to keep making copies. The commons will help out too. Your best pages will out live you as they are copied about by others.

We keep the copying part of wiki much simpler than the editing parts so that it will not be forgotten so soon. The 'json' format has no version numbers because there are no versions. Expect it to last.

Even the fancy parts of wiki are kept simpler than the average application that needs new features with every release. We've rewritten these parts from scratch several times now and hope someone will keep doing so forever. Everything good you write in wiki will make its future more secure.