Backing Up Mnemosyne

[animal world]

Thanks to this site i discovered Mnemosyne a few weeks ago and find it a great productivity tool. A few questions remain at this point.

a) Numerous entries from my own files imported into Mnemosyne have been reclassified to other categories. New cards have been added. I would like to back up this data by category (as opposed to the overall back-up by .Mnemosyne).

I've made two attempts to Export a category. The first time with a bit of test data and it worked fine. The test data was exported in the proper format and also remained in the Mnemosyne database. The second time i exported real data. I lost it from Mnemosyne and the exported data was in a useless, garbage format. Go figure! Since then, i'm leery of experimenting too much in Mnemosyne. I've been importing files to Mnemosyne using Q/A, plain text and UTF-8 encoding.

So, what's the best way to export/back up individual categories?

B) At this point, i'm clueless what purpose New/Open/Save/Save As serve in this program.

c) I have files with 200-2000+ entries. Is the learning process helped by dealing with smaller files in Mnemosyne or doesn't it make much difference?

Thanks for your feedback.

Edited September 23, 2009 at 12:46 AM by animal world

[renzhe]

File->Export->Select categories you want to export. Save them as XML, Mnemosyne can load that later.

It should work fine.

B) At this point, i'm clueless what purpose New/Open/Save/Save As serve in this program.

You can open .mem files, save the current mem file, or start a new .mem file.

A .mem file holds all your learning data and cards and history in a Mnemosyne-specific format.

c) I've files with 200-2000+ entries. Is the learning process helped by dealing with smaller files in Mnemosyne or doesn't it make much difference?

It might become slower once you exceed 10,000 cards with version 1.x, but otherwise there is no difference, other than extra clicking involved with having several smaller databases.

Version 2.x should fix the slowdown, but it will take a while before it's released, no release dates yet.

[animal world]

Thanks, Renzhe, for your prompt reply. Couldn't you just Import the file residing in .Mnemosyne instead of doing an Open/Save (as) ?

One final question, as i am concerned about exporting and losing all data as happened to me once, is it necessary to check the Reset Learning box or does that merely keep track of your memorization stats?

Thanks again.

I just want to say that this is a great program. Only wish i had discovered it a lot sooner!

[renzhe]

Couldn't you just Import the file residing in .Mnemosyne instead of doing an Open/Save (as) ?

Most people only ever need one database, meaning they only ever need one .mem file.

You can use categories to keep data organised neatly inside that database. So basically, you never need to use open or save, unless you're recovering a backup.

similarly, you only need "New" if you are starting a database from scratch.

One final question, as i am concerned about exporting and losing all data as happened to me once, is it necessary to check the Reset Learning box or does that merely keep track of your memorization stats?

You should not reset your learning data on export.

You want your scheduling information to be saved with everything else.

The only time you want to reset them is if you are making a deck for other people, who will be starting from scratch.

The best way to backup Mnemosyne is to copy the mnemosyne folder to a safe location regularly. Mnemosyne stores regular backups in there.

[animal world]

Thanks again, Renzhe, for your help. Yes, i've made a backup of the Mnemosyne folder and will do so regularly. I also like that everything is in one database. At this point, i prefer working with a number of categories but, if desired, it's possible to activate several or all at the same time. So, all in all, pretty flexible.

[animal world]

Periodically i save the .Mnemosyne file to a CD. However, i would also like to generate a copy of this as a word doc. The other day i opened this .Mnem xml file and to my surprise it opened in Explorer (why not Firefox?). I tried to do a Ctrl A and C and at that point Explorer crashed. When i did this with chunks of the file, the same thing happens. Is there an easy way to do this? I really would like to generate a word doc of this back-up.

In the meantime, i'm also using Anki but seem to have trouble importing data from either my hard-drive or from Mnemosyne. Two minor questions about Anki: i like to use categories but don't know where exactly to name a category when importing it into Anki. With Mnemosyne, i always see how many entries there are in a category and how many i have done/not done. Despite Anki having better stats overall, i don't see this feature there.

Thanks for any help!

[renzhe]

You can't open the Mnemosyne xml file in Word, as it is not a Word file. It is also not an xhtml file so it can't be opened by Internet Explorer. It can only be read by Mnemosyne.

What you want is to export your database into a TSV or CSV format. This can be read by most programs. Go to File->Export to do so.

[animal world]

As always, thanks Renzhe. Actually, it did open in Explorer after a good while but it was unstable and i'm not sure whether it was the complete file. But that's neither here nor there.

I just exported the database to "All Files" and it worked like a charm.

[animal world]

Perhaps i should explain why i'm so concerned about backing up Mnemosyne. I used to write out characters and words in little notebooks that slipped easily in my purse and i could use them whenever i had time to review them wherever i was. One day, i left all my notebooks on a picnic table in a park. Fortunately, i discovered this fifteen minutes later. I raced back to the park where i found two guys sitting at the table i had used. Much to my relief, all the notebooks were still there. One of the guys asked me, "What the hell is in these notebooks?"

After this, i typed out the contents of my little notebooks (it came from numerous sources) on my laptop and backed them up at numerous places. Besides CDs, i also back-up much stuff to appropriate folders in my yahoo email account.

When i started Mnemosyne, i stopped using the little notebooks. But since i still had a good supply of blank ones, i'm now using them again to learn to truly write the new characters i've learned since.