What is HOPPLA?
HOPPLA is an open source tool aiming to help you preserve your digital data for longer periods. It helps you do this by providing you with a set of different strategies for automated backup and preservation of digital data. The tool can handle your personal photos and/or videos, your digital music collection, your important work documents or any other type of digital data that has a value to you.
If you are interested in a concrete set of features please read the users guide or refer to the following page:
Hoppla Software Release.

What does HOPPLA stand for?
Well, HOPPLA is a backronym and stands for Home and Office Painless Persistent Long-term Archiving.

Why should I use HOPPLA?
There is really no short answer to this question, but we will just outline a few important facts that might make you think about your personal digital data.

• Paper-printed documents, books, photos, magazines, etc can last over decades.
• Digital data on the other hand has an average life cycle of 7 to 10 years.
• Hard disks are vulnerable to both physical and digital disasters.
• A lot widely used file formats are endangered and become obsolete with time.
• Software that renders your digital data or parts of it will eventually become obsolete or not supported.
• Your computer (hardware) will eventually become old and will be unable to run software that renders your files.
• and many many more.

HOPPLA takes measures and provides you with different strategies to cope with these and other problems and enables you to retrieve, access and use your data safely over time.

How can HOPPLA be free?
HOPPLA is free available. It was created at the University of Technology Vienna and the Austrian IT Research Institute as a part of the project Research Studio Digital Memory Engineering.

What does HOPPLA make to my files? Is there a risk?
Basically HOPPLA does not modify or delete any of your source files. However it copies all your files to different locations and converts some of these copies to other formats if there is a risk for the original source file to become obsolete. In this way you will have versions of your data replicated through different media types and thus lower the risk of digital decay. The converted files may lose some information (e.g. the layout of a document) but will preserve its contents for example.

Generally there is no risk for your original source collection to be harmed by HOPPLA. However, please note that the usage of the tool is undertake at your own risk and please read our Limitation of Liability Disclaimer.

I found a bug/error. What should I do?
HOPPLA is still in its development phase and there are surely some flaws and hiccups. If you think you have found a bug please feel free to submit it to the Hoppla Development Team. However, please do the following before submitting it. Check the log files and see if there wasn't another error reported there. For instance tools were not found while migrating files. Please also writes us how we can reproduce the bug if possible. We will appreciate any further information regarding your opinion of HOPPLA.

I am missing a feature and/or have a cool idea. Where can I report it?
HOPPLA is still in its development phase and we are trying to add many new cool features as fast as possible. We have a long list with such features and we added some of these to the users guide. If you have a cool idea or are just missing a feature please take a look into the users guide located at: Hoppla Software Homepage and if it is not already there drop us a line at Hoppla Development Team.

My Question was not answered here? Who or where should I ask?
Sorry, just submit it at hoppla@ifs.tuwien.ac.at.
Thanks!