Twitter Backup

The typical twitter backup service will ask you for your password, require additional registrations, store your data on some distant server, sell it to bad people or do some other annoying things.

This bash script allows you to download all your public musings by yourself. It's very ugly and it works.

#!/bin/bash
if [ -z "$1" ] then
   echo 'twitter name:'
   read twittername
else
   twittername=$1
fi
if [ -z "$2" ] then
   filename="$twittername.xml"
else
   filename=$2
fi
temp=`mktemp temp.XXXXXX`
trap "rm $temp; exit 1" SIGINT SIGTERM
echo '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>' > $filename
echo '<statuses type="array">' >> $filename
for counter in {1..1024} do
   url="http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/$twittername.xml?page=$counter"
   curl $url > $temp
   if [ $(grep -c 'Rate limit exceeded' $temp) -eq 0 ] then
      if [ $(grep -c '<status>' $temp) -ne 0 ] then
         echo "appending page nr. $counter"
         sed '1,2d;$d' $temp >> $filename
      else
         echo '</statuses>' >> $filename
         break
      fi
   else
      echo "Rate limit exceeded. Press return after waiting (ca. 1hr)."
      read anykey
   fi
done
rm $temp

Tipp: After downloading your (or someone else's) data you may want to transform the XML file into readable HTML using XSLT (or something similar).

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