I have edited the answer wiki, but finding that my edits have been “submitted for review”, and being mistrustful, I am posting my current understanding here. I will update this (and, if I am allowed to, the Answer Wiki) as more initiatives come to light; Didier Szende is working on a solution.
All solutions are vulnerable to the frequent changes in the Quora UI, and need to be updated frequently. All solutions are vulnerable to Quora detecting multiple downloads from the same IP address, and blocking access by that IP address, which may mean you can no longer access Quora: do not use solutions that download multiple links in parallel.
- t3nsor/quora-backup is Python code that works well, but is restricted to the command line. (As of this writing only forks of Brian Bi’s code work, because of changes to Quora HTML: opoudjis/quora-backup, dda/quora-backup.)
- Free Your Stuff is an open source Chrome extension (still in beta) that downloads your contributions to supported websites, including Quora (answers only at this point). It also lets you re-publish them into the public domain if you so choose. See detailed answer below. (There were problems with very large answer sets prior to version 0.3.19; if you’re affected, try again with the latest version.)
- How to back up all your quora answers to your computer by Robert Walker on Random things describes an approach to spidering Quora content (downloading all of it), which is what quora-backup and Free Your Stuff do, but without cleaning up and stripping down the downloaded HTML files as they do. Strongly recommend throttling the interval between downloads, to a few seconds.
- Mehul Mohan’s answer to Can you download all Quora answers from one person? does the same thing of downloading all content from within the browser, using Javascript. I suspect it might run out of memory quickly.
And a review (out of scope I think of an Answer Wiki):
If you’re comfortable with the command line, the Python solutions work, though I’ve only ever downloaded 1000 answers at a time. Bad idea, btw, since the HTML can change radically between different times of download, even with the solutions that strip out HTML noise.
If not, try Free My Stuff; I couldn’t get it to go past 1k when I time, but the developer has reported that is fixed. He’s also annoyed because the HTML keeps changing; that’s why I recommend my fork of Brian’s code over his original.
Walker’s solution does what the others do for downloading content, but it makes me anxious, in case it accidentally downloads links in parallel, or too quickly. Be familiar with your spidering software’s configurations before using it.