Google Earth Community: Managing your Google Earth data

downloads – for GE stuff I’ve downloaded

Now, let’s look inside the most important folder, “kml”:

I’ve got a separate sub-folder in here for each logical group of placemarks, paths and polygons – each of these corresponds to a folder that could be in My Places, or a KML document.

OK, so now we have a Windows folder for each GE collection or project – let’s have a look inside one:

Inside the “sncf rail stations” folder you’ll find various KML and KMZ files of my French rail placemarks – so why are there so many of them?

Making point-in-time copies
It makes sense to take point-in-time copies of your work every now and again. If you make a mistake or if your computer has a problem, you should be able to go back to the last point you saved your data. How do you do this? That’s simple: right-click on the object or folder in GE and choose “Save as…” (or equivalent for Mac or Linux). Don’t overwrite previous versions of that data that you’ve written – create a new file each time; a simple approach is to append a new number on the end of the name each time you save. This way, if you make a mistake, you can go back though the versions you’ve saved to just before the point when the mistake was made and still have access to any other good changes made afterwards.

How often should you make point-in-time copies? That’s simple too: as often as you think how awful it would be if you lost your data since the last one! If you’re adding a large number of placemarks manually, you might not mind having to redo the work of 5 of them – 50 might be something quite different.

Hard disks are fairly large these days (well, compared to the size of the KML files I work with) but if you find space is running low, take a back up of your “ge” folder (maybe to a CD) and delete some of the older versions.

Now when you want to work with one of your data collections, simply open the appropriate KML file; it will open into Temporary Places in GE but you can simply move it into My Places if you want to work on it for a while. Of course, once you’re finished and happy with it, save it as a new version – then you can delete it from My Places if you want.
If your work becomes corrupted – maybe you get a parse error when you try to load it – you now have a more reasonable choice of going back to the previous version or trying to troubleshoot the code in a smaller KML file.

I have KML and KMZ files here but I would recommend keeping your work as KML in general and converting to the smaller KMZ format before sending it across the Internet (for example, by email or posting to this forum) – this is because saving as KMZ copied images (including custom icons) into the compressed file and this can cause problems if you come to work with the file further (see this post for more about the differences between KML and KMZ).

Backups
If your data is important to you, it should be backed up in case you have a problem and loose it; even though we’re now organising our data outside of the application (not all in My Places), it’s still all on one hard disk. What happens if that disk breaks or gets accidentally written over?

Every now again you should take a back up of your data (to somewhere other than the same hard drive!). Clearly this goes for all of your data – not just the you GE data; if you don’t already have a backup plan, it might be worth investing in a CD/DVD writer or an external USB drive.

So, there you go!
In summary then, if you have lots of data, it’s better to have lots of simple sets rather than one big complex one – and if it’s important to you, make lots of copies and back it up often.

Have fun!

Simon.

Edited by simon_a (11/24/06 01:57 PM)