Web app lock in – Getting your data out

As more and more desktop applications are being replaced with their web counterparts, data ownership is becoming an increasing concern – At least it should be. The problem is, the more you invest into a system, in terms of time and data, the more you tie yourself to it, until one day, you want to leave.

The reasons for wanting to leave can vary from cost, a change in your requirements, or simply a better product/service elsewhere. Whenever you need to switch, there is always a cost associated, be it money, time or both.

At work (And Digital), we’re currently going through a significant change in terms of the services we’re using. These changes include:

  1. Condensing all our servers to one, fully managed server from Layershift
  2. Migrating issue tracking from Lighthouse and Codebase to activeCollab
  3. Migrating our SVN repositories from Beanstalk and Codebase to self hosted repositories

I’ll be focusing on the last 2 tasks, as that’s where the issue lies. Lighthouse allows you to export your entire account as a directory structure with a JSON and CSVfile for each ticket. Although activeCollab can’t natively import this, we have the data in a usable format, and the primary need for this data is archive/backup, as 99% of the tickets are completed.

Beanstalk allows us to download an SVN dump of each repository which we can then load into a new repository using the svnadmin load command.

Codebase on the other hand, doesn’t provide an automated way to export projects or code repositories. I even contacted support who suggested a few tools/scripts which would help, but confirmed there is no official way to do this. And it’s not like Codebase is a new application either, as it’s soon to have version 4 released!

I’ll end with this plea to all web application developers:

The last interaction your users will have with your application is when they leave. You can’t force them to stay with you any longer by locking down all their data. Make it easy for them to leave and make their last impression a good one. This way, they can become your evangelists, as even though you may no longer meet their needs, they will know plenty of people for whom you’d be perfect.