restore
25 Dec 2008Update: Beta 2 Released! See the Gaebar Beta 2 announcement.
Backing up and restoring the datastore in your local SDK can be very useful for several use cases. Personally, I find that I alternate between running the local SDK with a restore of data from the deployment environment and with an empty or test datastore.
The local SDK slows down painfully when you populate it with real amounts of data so sometimes I test with an empty datastore while developing. Restoring data, however, takes a long time too so I don't want to run my restore process all the time. And I don't have to, since I can simply backup the local datastore and restore is by copying it back.
This is a quick screencast to show you the data export solution I've created for Google App Engine that lets you backup your application's datastore and restore it either locally on your development machine or on the same Google App Engine application on the deployment environment or on a different Google App Engine application (which you can use as a staging environment).