While reading another thread about sync errors and the advice given to export listings, and then import them after wiping the sync database, I have to ask:
In the Orders screen there’s an Export Orders… option and you can export them to CSV, Tab, or Semicolon formats. Is there any way to import any of these formats back into the GS database? I have some orders [and sold items] in a GS install on a remote Mac that I would love to bring into my main Mac. These are sold lisings/orders that are no longer on eBay’s website as they happened in 2022. But sadly they never synced to my 2023 Mac Studio.
So - this question is mainly for the orders side of things - any way to import older orders [that do not exist in the ebay history] into my main Mac? Bonus would be to have the sold listings also be able to be imported. I don’t mind sneaker netting this [not relying on sync]. It would take a while as the remote Mac mini is 90 minutes away from me, so it would need to be something I could do via USB thumb drive as my Internet connection between the remote site and my current site is very, very slow.
Sorry, I missed that you were asking about Orders!
I would also like this feature!
If the remote Mac is still running GarageSale (whether syncing or not), I would suggest you export them to individual GarageSale listing files. Select the ones you want to export, and hold the Option key down when selecting the Export… menu item, and you should see “Export N listings as separate files...” appear.
That way, each listing is a self-contained .gslisting file of its own, and is complete (AFAIK).
When I had a secondary machine die unexpectedly, I was able to salvage a few hundred important listings this way from its database and transfer them over the LAN to the new install by selecting Import listing... and selecting the correct subset.
The only trick is that the resulting files are not plain text, and include all the images within them. But you can use any developer search tool (including Finder/Spotlight, I think) to search the contents of the files even if you can’t see them in most lay editors.
I also do this with my Sold listings every few months (I think I’ve been storing anything that closed more than 3 months back), and remove them from the active database once they’re on our NAS drive in the backup. I have definitely been able to re-import as needed.
That said, it would be nice if there were a way of keeping a small textual “shadow” of the exported listings in GS, so they could be searched without being present… but that’s not possible now AFAIK.
Fair warning: the export individual listings command is slow as molasses, because so much is saved in each bundle. I think when I last archived Sold listings, 500 of them took 20 hours or so to export.
Actually I do have sold listings - over 9 months worth, that I would like to export from the older Mac mini onto my main Mac Studio, so your solution may in fact work. I just have thousands of active and sold listings on my main Mac and don’t want to mess any of those up.
I would love to have an archive like you have. I am still very confused about the GS database, as it appears it is a directory and not a SQLite database [I use Bookpedia as my main database for all my listings since the app is quite mature and stable and keeps the info I enter into a SQLite db which I can run queries on outside of the app itself and do mass alterations, backups, etc.
For what reason do you remove sold listings from GS? Does it affect performance or is it purely a storage issue [many of my listings have 32 images, so the listings can be large in size, but I also have those images on my WebDAV server for the eBay listings - would love to find a good way to prune those after I know the items have sold, but that’s a project for next February when the busy season is over. ].
Were you able to use GS during those 20 hours? That would be a show stopper for me, as now till February, I doubt I will have a 20 hour break, and I have a lot more than 500 listings.
Because of all the complex binary data (images, and thumbs, especially) I suspect the database is tightly integrated into on-disk storage. I’m sure the devs might be willing to explain; I don’t know the language or platform they used, TBH.
I’ve recently moved to a MBP with M3-pro chip, so I things have improved, but I used to be using an MBP with an Intel chip for my main GarageSale machine. There were definitely both performance and storage problems. I think I decided to offload sold listings mainly because I’d run GrandPerspective.app and the largest chunk of stuff on that machine (after Xcode) was GarageSale data. I think because I was saving my images (in Photos) and there were copies and more copies inside the GS db.
I have a strange workflow, where I manually stop a random subset of about 20% of my active fixed-price listings, change the price randomly, and re-launch every couple of days. So the Deleted listings also pile up, and I diligently remove those. They also all contained image copies.
I probably exaggerated when I said it might take 20 hours. GarageSale was not responsive while they were saving, though. But again, this was on a very slow old-timey 2019-era processor. If you have a new Studio it will probably be much faster.
Suggestion: Select 10 listings and save them to individual files, and see. If it’s too fast to notice, try 100. I imagine you’ll find it works OK.
I was just about to do an experiment and report, and realize there’s one more reason the backup/export might be slow: I’m always doing it over our LAN mesh network, to the NAS, and honestly I neglected last time to put the 500 or so .gslisting files into folders.
Actually that’s a workflow I would like to start to adopt. I’ve been put off a bit by how much work it involves with GS. For my eBay selling, I am a buy it now only seller [I also sell on Amazon and have since 2008, so I am used to the non-bidding style of transaction]. I might flirt with bidding one day, but it’s worked well so far. That said, I would love to take some of my “dead wood” as we booksellers call it, and recycle it a bit - remove it from eBay, and list it as new with updated prices. I do some markdowns via the eBay website [which I would love to do in GS, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to easily say, “hey, items that have been listed on ebay for 300 days, and are for sale at greater than $30, put on sale at 15% off for the next 45 days”, while I can do that very easily with eBay’s website].
I do delete images from Photos after exporting them to a folder that Hazel processes [it removes the geotagging and compresses the image via jpegmini as my photos are also hosted on my WebDAV server and I found that via e.mail a customer could see the metadata on the images]. Once they are in GS in the listing, I remove them from Finder as well. So they basically stay in GS and on my WebDAV server. A workflow to remove WebDAV hosted images after something is sold out is on my long term todo list].
Bookpedia by Bruji also contains blob data - the image thumbnail that one can put on a record. But I do believe now that I think about it, that is really just a text field, and not a blob field - it is the file name of the image, as images are stored in a Finder folder. I typically don’t put images with my records I create in Bookpedia, but if I am scanning barcodes, the app does grab an image from Amazon. But since each record only has one image, the database itself is basically all text. For GS, other than listing images, the rest is all text as well, so, selfishly, I would love to see them go to SQLite as that allows the data to live in an open architecture so one can import/export and run reports and such on the data. The main developer at Bruji is on sabbatical yet I am not stressed since I can easily migrate the data behind the app into anything else that would allow import; I know GS does allow exporting of sales as CSV, and hopefully listings as well, but the database living in multiple files in a Finder folder does make me pause a bit.
And that’s not cool that the app was unresponsive during export. I still have a 2015 core i7 MacBook Air 11" with 8GB of ram and am surprised how fast things run on it [including Final Cut Pro!]. The export process must be very CPU intensive to work your 2019 Intel CPU like that!
I do know that when storage becomes stressed, macOS doesn’t handle it very well and general performance suffers, so perhaps the images and such were the main reasons for your slow down.
I would love to offload some storage to my NAS - Looks like I will be doing some playing around with exporting old listings as .gslisting files and see what happens. Thank you so much for sharing your input and your experience using GS and doing these processes. It is much appreciated!
I just have thousands of active and sold listings on my main Mac and don’t want to mess any of those up.