Issue 42: What is happening?
Status:  New
Owner: ----
Reported by toqueret...@gmail.com, Nov 11, 2010
Hello guys,
What is happening?
All time when I start my backup, "splash" the message:

"Oh no! Twitter is busy and won't talk to me (error 502). But you may be able to retrieve a partial backup by setting the 'ignore errors' option and trying again."

Any problem?

Regards,
Nov 12, 2010
Project Member #1 alfredarmstrong@gmail.com
Do you get anything if you set the "ignore errors" option?
Nov 14, 2010
#2 kaw...@gmail.com
I keep getting that same message when I try to backup my tweets... I'm at over 10k thought I know you can only pull the last 3200. I'm trying this at a time when the twitter servers shouldn't be overwhelmed, but over and over, it keeps happening. if I do tell it to ignore error, it downloads a small file with only my last 800 or so tweets. I noticed on the site you wrote about issues. I honestly hadn't used the site in 2 months so I don't know what happened and if this is part of that. I welcome your input. Thanks.
Nov 14, 2010
#3 kaw...@gmail.com
forgot to mention that it doesn't seem to have any problems whatsoever pulling my faves file, which has apparently doubled in size since I last backed it up from 700kb to over 1.4 megs. (even though I've only added 3 new favorite tweets since my last backup 2 months ago). My tweet files in the past have run about 2 megs in size... so I can't imagine size being a big issue... or at least I would expect the file to be at least 1.4 megs as well. Anyway, hope that helps.
Nov 14, 2010
Project Member #4 alfredarmstrong@gmail.com
The issues you mention were unrelated to this problem: a disk full error was causing the sign-in process to fail every time.

Tweetake is very simple: we try to pull all your data until reaching the limit or getting an error. If you check the ignore errors box, we return what we have got so far. If Twitter sends back an error, that's the best we can do. 

I just ran my own tests and I see the same problem. It looks like Twitter returns an error every time, except not always at the same point - I got a lot more data on my second attempt than the first.

The only thing we could do differently would be to retry a few times on an error, but I am reluctant to do that as it will simply increase the load on Twitter when most likely that's the root of the problem.