Export everything
Your writing is never locked in. To take a copy of your whole site:
- Open your profile, from the menu under your site’s name.
- Press Export my site, at the top of the page.
- You see “Your export is on its way”. Within a few minutes, an email headed “Your export of your site is ready” reaches the address you sign in with.
- Press Download the zip in that email.
The link works for 24 hours, and the zip itself is deleted after seven days. You can make a new export once a day, any day; try again sooner and you are told when the next one can be made.
What is in the zip
- Every series, book, chapter, post and page, each as a Markdown file: plain text that any writing app can open, with its title, dates and settings at the top.
- Every image you uploaded, from covers to your photo, and your PDF and ePub downloads, as you uploaded them.
- Your profile and your site’s settings, and each book’s details such as its formats and buy links, as JSON files.
- Your Members’ email addresses and the dates they joined, in members.csv, which any spreadsheet opens.
Messages from your contact form are not in it: each one is already in your email.
It is worth making one now and then, as a backup of your own, and always before you delete anything.
Delete your account
Deleting your account deletes your site and everything on it, at once and for good: books, chapters, drafts, posts, pages, images and downloads, and your Members, with everything recorded about their reading. Your site’s address stops working straight away. Nothing can be brought back afterwards, so export first.
- Open the menu under your initials, at the top right, and choose Account settings.
- Under Delete account, press Delete account.
- Enter your password and press Delete account again.
If you only want a fresh start, there is no need to delete the account: remove the books, posts or pages you no longer want, one by one.
If you stop using it
Free hosting stays free partly by not keeping abandoned accounts. An account is deleted for being quiet only when both of these are true:
- nobody has signed in to it for a year, and
- nothing on its site is published: no published book, post or page.
Before anything happens, we email you, with the subject “Your Draft Margin account will be deleted on a date”, thirty days ahead. Signing in before that date is all it takes to keep it; the email has a Sign in to keep it button. If you are done with it, there is nothing to do.
A site with anything published is never deleted for being quiet, however long it has been since you signed in.
If the platform ever closes
If Draft Margin shuts down, every author gets six months’ notice by email, and Export my site keeps working until the very end. The page on why it is free says what it costs to run, and what keeps it going.
Still stuck, or found something wrong on this page? Contact support.