Now that you’ve written a veritable tome in the Dream Log, you should be asking yourself, “How do I back up my entries?” If you aren’t asking yourself that question, well, it’s a good idea to think about it. As someone once quipped, “There are two kinds of people in the world: people who do back up, and people who will back up.”
The good news is that backing up is easy with iTunes. First, plug in your iPad and open iTunes. Your iPad will appear under “DEVICES.” Select your iPad.
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1. Right-click (or press control-click) on the name of your iPad (iPad in this example). Select Transfer Purchases from the menu. This backs up all applications you have purchased from the App Store onto your computer. If you use iTunes to buy apps, they’re already on your computer.
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2. Right-click again, and select Back Up. It’s that easy.
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3. This also makes it simple to move your entries (and everything else) to a new iPad. Once you have the new device plugged in, all you need to do is choose Restore from Backup to have all our entries on the new machine. Isn’t the future great?
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4. Advanced backup. If you want to make a backup of only your entries, iTunes lets you do that, too. Again, plug in your iPad and select it under DEVICES. Then select Apps from the menu at the top of the screen.
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5. Scroll down, and at the bottom of the window, you’ll see the list of apps that support iTunes File Sharing. Select The Dream Log.
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5. Now in the right pane you should see “The_Dream_Log.sqlite” You may also see something that says “The_Dream_Log~.sqlite” You can ignore that. It's an old file that gets made when you upgrade to a new version of The Dream Log. Select the first file, then press Save to... and save “The_Dream_Log.sqlite” on your computer. Alternately, you can just drag the file out of the window (on a Mac). Important: Now you need to put that file somewhere safe. You could put it on iDisk or Dropbox for safekeeping in the cloud. Or burn it to a CD or DVD and mail it to a relative in another state.
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6. If you ever need to restore just your entries, navigate to this window again. Delete the file that says “The_Dream_Log.sqlite.” Then, choose Add... and navigate to the file you saved previously.
