Back up your Help Center articles at the click of a button!

Wonderful app. Thank you! Any ideas on why only articles in one language are being exported? We have aricles in Portuguese (Default) and English but only pt-br are being exported at this time. Thanks in advance.

@Yasmin - Thanks for getting in touch. When I first created the app I focused only on downloading the articles from the default language. Unfortunately, at this time it's not possible to download multiple localisations.

Hi Felix! So, if I change the default language I would be able of downloading them?

Hello Felix,

Is there a way to make the backed up .html files point to the files in the images folder?

Oh dear, Yasmin, apologies for the late response I just have missed this. In theory that may work for you though.

@Andrew - At the moment there isn't a way for you to do this, I would need to code this functionality from my side.

Hi Felix,

as I am still not sure after reading all the comments:

Does the backup work for every language the Help Center is set up?

We have English as default language but also added Content in Dutch.

Thanks in advance!

@David - Thanks for leaving a comment. It only works with the default language at the moment. That being said a workaround suggested (but unconfirmed) was to change the default language to target the specific content you wish to backup. Hope that helps!

Hi Felix,

thank you for your reply. 

It tested it with the workaround (changing the default language), and what can I say:

It works!

So as long as Zendesk is not able to add a feature like this I highly recommend kBackup!

You did a fantastic work with it!

@David - That's great! I am glad to hear that the workaround works for you and you were able to get your content downloaded that way. Also great to have confirmation of this for others who might be looking to do the same in the future. Thanks again David, glad kBackup could help! :)

Hi Felix,

it´s me again.

I used the program but for I don´t know what reasons it stopped working and giving me an error message instead:

It seems an error with .NET Framework, but after checking with my Admin I can confirm I have .Net 4.7 installed.

If needed I can send you the Details via email.

Do you have any idea?


Best
David

@David - No worries. We can have a look and see what might be causing that. Could you email me felix.stubner(at)gmail.com the log files from the backup directory. Could you also expand the Details on that error message and copy the text and include it in your email as well. With that info I should be able to get an idea of what might be causing this.

@Felix, thank you for your response. I have sent you an email a minute ago.

Thanks a lot,
David

Pardon me if the information is already found somewhere and I missed it. But do you have a Mac specific file to download? The .exe from my understanding is specific to PC. 

Hello 512155956,

Would you be willing to respond to your and if it is Mac-specific?

Best regards.

379574987874 - Thanks for the nudge.

377118933233 - A Mac version isn't currently available I'm afraid. I have considered creating one in the past and may do so but don't have an ETA. If you don't have access to a Windows machine, you may get it to work using a software such as Wine that emulates Windows. Hope that helps!

Hello 512155956,

Way to be a "Titan" with your response there!

379574987874 kBackup has been going for a while now and I try to respond usually within 24-48 hours to make sure users get answers relatively quickly.

Really liking the new Mention feature, when I @someone it now actually tags them which is cool. Thanks for stopping by!

Thanks for the positive feedback on the mentions functionality, 512155956!

HI Felix, it's Great tool!

I want to let the sandbox do the uploading.
If you use Google Drive.
It takes time and effort to convert from HTML files to Google documents.
The URL number of the article is displayed in the title.
These two points are very troublesome.

I wonder if there is a better way.

Hi @Masako Kobayashi, 

Thanks for giving kBackup a try.

I understand that being able to export the files into different formats would be beneficial and it's an idea I have noted as an enhancement in the past. Whether I will get to it anytime soon, I cannot say.

Regarding the second point you had about the article ID being displayed in the title. I'd like to better understand the use-case here. Why is this causing an issue for your use-case?

Hi Felix, glad to hear back.

I'm using kBackup to keep the production and sandbox environments the same, but I see the ID in the title.

This ID is not necessary for me.

I don't want to confuse our users by showing extra numerical information in the title.
As for modifying the files, I think it would be difficult to remove them if there are too many files.

If you have any useful suggestions, I'd be happy to hear them.

Hi @Masako, 

thanks for getting back to me and clarifying.

As the format of the way titles are saved is hard-coded there isn't a way to customize this.

That being said, if you are familiar with Python or another scripting language, it wouldn't be too difficult to write a script that will simply rename the files to not include the numerical value and brackets. 

As for the files, you could similarly use a script to change the file contents and remove any of the HTML formatting and change the file extension to convert it to a plain-text file.

Hope these suggestions are helpful.

Hi Felix, glad to hear back.
I have one more question.

I have a lot of files that have been converted with broken file names.
In fact, when I install it in the sandbox, it is reflected as a choppy file.
Has this ever happened before?
I would like to ask for a fix if possible.

Hi @Masako,

What you are seeing is actually expected behavior.

I purposely shortened it to a reasonable length and replaced any remaining characters with ... to indicate that the title exceeded this limit.

This is to ensure that when a file is saved, there's a much lower chance that the file path exceeds the Windows imposed 259 character limit for file paths. Exceeding the character limit will prevent interactions with the file. You can find more info on this here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/naming-a-file. 

I think the only real solution to this behavior is for the app to handle backup and also restoring the content and managing the data itself. It's something I've considered in the past but haven't had the time to implement this functionality. 

That being said, the full title should still be included in the HTML header within the file, so this is something you could potentially also script if you'd like to work around this, by extracting the title from the file content and then updating the file name.

Hope that helps to answer your query. If there's anything else don't hesitate to let me know.

Hey Felix

Really great tool, and one that we are hoping to utilize over the coming weeks. 

I am curious if there is a file size or article number limit as we appear to be missing a handful of articles from one of our exports? 

Kind regards

Andrew