excavator

Visualize your digital footprint.

Installing Excavator

There are different ways to install Excavator. The first method is particularly meant to be used by non-developer users.

Non-developer users

First click on "Releases" :

You should see the last release on your screen (v0.2.0 when we are writing this). Depending on your OS (Windows, Linux or Mac), click on one the three files highlighted.

It should download the file on your device. Then you need to uncompress it.

Windows

We are using 7zip to unzip the file.

Put this file in C:\Windows\System32, and the installation is completed. You should now be able to use Excavator in a terminal.

Linux

Click on the file you just downloaded.

Then extract it wherever you want. In our case, we extract it in Desktop.

Finally, open a terminal and type the following command sudo cp PATH_TO_EXCAVATOR /usr/local/bin (replace PATH_TO_EXCAVATOR by the path to where you extracted excavator in the previous step).

The installation is completed, you should now be able to use Excavator in a terminal.

MacOS

Extract excavator-linux.tar.gz in usr/local/bin.

The installation is completed, you should now be able to use Excavator in a terminal.

Developer users

Compiling from source

You need to have a package manager called cargo in your local.

If you already have got rustc installed in your local, you also have cargo installed locally.

And then you can install with this command.

$ cargo install --git https://github.com/ichnion/excavator --branch develop

Install from crates.io

You can also install from package registry.

$ cargo install excavator

Install from Homebrew

$ brew tap ichnion/tap
$ brew install excavator

Update to the latest version

$ brew upgrade ichnion/tap/excavator

How to use Excavator

Excavator read and store your exported digital data. Currently, we support part of Google Takeout and Facebook data.

Once you specify the directory, for instance Google Takeout, excavator recursively find an applicable file and read the data.

$ excavator read ~/Downloads/Takeout // Downloaded Google Takeout directory

Or you can specify the single file cargo install

$ excavator read Location History.json // A single file from downloaded Google Takeout

Note: To enforce Delete Cascade on tables with Foreign Keys in Sqlite, the following has to be set before deletions:

sqlite> PRAGMA foreign_keys = ON;