Often users will want to keep their data after a project ends just to have it for later access.
Sometimes they need it to report to government bodies that request information.
In this article you will find information about exporting the following information:
Models - Topics- Documents - Members - Notifications
When a contract ends we put an expiration date on the project.
Before the expiration date runs out the data is still accessible by all the users of the project.
After the expiration date has ran out no users (not even us) can access the project data but it is still on our servers. At this stage the project is still recoverable.
By contract, expired projects are kept for three years.
After this period it cannot be guaranteed that we still have the project data on our servers. The project is recoverable as long as it is on our servers.
Export of models - 2 ways
There is an export button for models. Here you can download the latest revisions for every model in one export. This is the easiest way to use if you only need the latest revision of the models.
Enter a model and click on the download button for every revision. This is the easiest way to download all the revisions of all the models.
Previous revisions
The best way to export previous revisions of a model is to click on the model name and click on the download button for each revision in the right information panel.
Export of topics - 3 Ways
BCF - Open standard that can be used by other programs. This option can be hard to use for those who are not used to the file format. Here you do not have proof of downloaded date but each file contains information about when the topic was made. With this format you are guaranteed to get the most information possible.
Excel - I do not recommend the Excel export since it exports the least amount of information
PDF - This export option can be good to use if you want an export option that is easily readable and accessible for most people. Here you also get the download date of the set of documents which can be important for reporting to authorities. BCF still has the most information and is the best to use if you want to open the topics up again in the future.
Export of documents:
Documents can be downloaded with the download documents button.
Desktop connector
You might want to use the Catenda Desktop Connector to expedite this process.
The Desktop Connector lets you periodically download the latest project documents to your local system. It downloads documents faster and downloads them one by one minimizing the risk of download failure even further.
One drawback could be that documents will end up on your system unzipped, therefore taking up more space.
Deleted documents
Be sure to also search for "deleted" so you can find all deleted documents and export these as well if desired. Keep in mind that this is language specific and might be a different search word in your language.
It is recommend to download smaller numbers of documents at a time since it can take longer for large file sizes. Breaking up the downloads reduces the chance for anything going wrong in the download process.
Previous revisions
The best way to export previous revisions of a document is to select the document and click on the download button for each revision in the right information panel.
Export of members information:
This is described in the members page article.
Export of notifications - 2 ways
Take a screenshot of the project notification page.
By default you only see 10 notifications per page so with thousands of notifications this can take a long time. As a solution you can use the limit filter to get more notifications per page so you have to take fewer screenshots and possibly even get all notifications on one page!
Because it is not possible to search in the text of a screenshot you might want to add an administrator user to the project that has project specific emails summaries enabled.
At the end of the project these emails can then be exported and delivered together with the rest of the project data.