Good News and Bad News: Multiply Media Backup

December 02, 2012

The Bad News

Multiply is shutting down the social networking aspect which includes photo and video sharing and blog posting. Why? Because everyone has moved on to Facebook so essentially Multiply has been wasting their precious server resources hosting all of our memories for free.

(Even I can attest that the only reason I go to Multiply this past couple of years is to do online shopping. It's convenient and has many payment options available, and it's our local version of an eBay. Seeing this move now makes me think if they regret the times when Multiply was THE social network and they shut down online shops because they were considered a "misuse" in the Terms and Agreements policy.)

Exporting blog posts was easy. All I had to do was follow the instructions for migrating your blog posts to your provider of choice: Tumblr or Blogger. (Visit the links below to see the instructions.)

http://(INSERT USER ID).multiply.com/export-to-blogger 
http://(INSERT USER ID).multiply.com/export-to-tumblr

In an effort to backup my photos and videos, I followed the instruction via the Download Media tool that they provided.

http://(INSERT USER ID).multiply.com/download-media

I tried using Chrome and Mozilla Firefox but it was hopeless. I kept on receiving an error.

Proxy Error
The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.
The proxy server could not handle the request GET /image/TnpooPCsa2ASoFo+xVjkhA/photos/1/orig/2008/IMG-0130.JPG.
Reason: Invalid Content-Length from remote server

I gave up a day before the deadline, thinking it would be too time-consuming to manually download everything.

The Good News

According to the press release, everything social networking-related will be shut down on December 1. It is now December 2 and they are still live. (UPDATE: Deadline is extended until December 31! #GoodGuyMultiply) Early this morning, I read on Twitter that Kath was able to download her photos via the Media Locker. She gave me this guide from Nico.

At first, I had a problem locating the Media Locker. My account did not have that tab on Nico's guide.

Instead of the Media Locker tab, mine has Stock Room
Then, Kath, being the helpful girl that she is, gave me her link and fortunately for me, it worked!

http://(yourURL).multiply.com/manage#_li_photos

It was helpful for the recent photos but it didn't work on the photos uploaded on 2009 and older. Instead of thumbnails, these was what I got.


(I know this is supposed to be the good news section so please bear with me. Haha!) Again, I lost all hope. It was already 6AM. I thought the photos and videos will go down at 12noon just because it's the end of December 1 EST. So I thought, "Hey, maybe I'll just browse the photos, take it in and burn everything into my memory." Then, fate became kind. There was actually another way to download every album into a zip file!

Here are the instructions, in case you are encountering the very same issue.
  1. Click on an album.
  2. Start a slideshow. (Click that Slideshow text on the upper right corner of the photo)
    Hindi uso ang makeup sakin noon.
  3. When the slideshow is up, click on the Download button on the uppermost right corner.
  4. Click on the Download entire album as a zip file option and voila!
So that's it, that the good news. I was able to salvage everything in no time. Did you get to save your files with no problem? I'd like to hear the issues you encountered. :)

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2 comments

  1. I just opened Multiply.com and was very shocked the moment I saw that they have completely constructed their site into a totally new one. I never got news about this even in my email and now I just feel extremely devastated as I did not able to do this back-up thing :(( If only I knew, I would've done the same :(( Is there any way I could still retrieve my files from there? Those are the only copies I have as I do not have any back-up files of those :( Pls do help me in this matter :( Thanks.

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