Archiving your data

To save your Publish or Perish queries and the associated results data to an archive, use the Export to Archive command. You can subsequently reload these data into Publish or Perish on the same computer or on a different computer through the Import from Archive command.

Publish or Perish data archives store the following information:

• The selected queries and their parameters,
• The query results,
• The metrics for the query results,
• The folder structure that contains the queries that are being exported.

The main uses for a Publish or Perish data archive are:

• Transferring your data from one computer to another,
• Creating a backup of your data that can be restored in the event of a computer problem.

Note: To export query data for exchange with other programs than Publish or Perish, see Exporting your data.

Exporting the data archive

To export the Publish or Perish data archive, use the following procedure.

1. Go to the multi-query center.
2. Select the queries or the folder to export, or the All queries root to export the entire queries tree.
3. Right-click on the selected item and choose Export to Archive, or choose File > Export to Archive from the main menu.
4. When prompted, enter a file name for the data archive and click Save.

Publish or Perish will then save the queries with all their parameters and their metrics, plus the complete results for each query. The resulting archive file has a .pxa file extension and can be used to import the same queries and their data into Publish or Perish on the same or a different computer.

Importing the data archive

To import a Publish or Perish data archive that you or someone else previously exported, use the following procedure.

1. Choose File > Import from Archive from the main menu.
2. When prompted, select the archive that you want to import and click Open.

Publish or Perish will then load the queries and their data from the archive and merge them into your existing queries tree in the multi-query center. While merging, Publish or Perish applies the following rules:

• If an incoming query is the same as an existing query, the existing query is overwritten if the incoming data are newer. If the incoming data are older than the existing data, no change is made.
• If an incoming query has no counterpart in the existing tree, it is simply added to the tree.
• If an incoming folder is already present in the existing tree, its contents are merged with the existing folder's contents.
• If an incoming folder is not yet present in the existing tree, it is added to the tree and its contents are then processed further.

During the merge process, Publish or Perish uses internal IDs to track individual queries and folders. The purpose of these IDs is to locate the correct queries and folders even if they have been moved to a new location in the existing tree after the data archive was originally exported. On occasion, this might cause imported queries or folders to show up in a different location than they were in when originally exported, but that is by design and avoids duplicating the information in the old and the new tree locations.