New Feature: Export Recording Data

Octavian -

A new feature has been rolled out today: the ability to export the recording data on your Pipe account as .csv.

The feature is available to all accounts (trial, PRO, Standard, etc.) in the new Pipe account dashboard at https://dashboard.addpipe.com/export .

The feature should come in handy if you want to:

  1. import the data into other tools (like Excel or Google Sheets) for easier analysis/search/filtering etc.
  2. download all the recordings stored by us
  3. review the PII we store & process for you
  4. backup the recording data

Another use case we were targeting was being able to calculate your monthly usage. It didn't made it in this iteration as the data we need to include is quite different & specific (we need to include info about deleted recordings, price/min, price/recording, price tier and the export start and end times need to be matched to the billing cycles). We'll add the functionality in a different push/iteration.

By default, a minimal set of fields is exported to keep the export process fast and the file small (the recording id, numeric environment id, region, UTC datetime, whether or not the recording was recovered, the name, initial container, length, initial size, initial width, initial height & the custom payload), but you can easily add two extra groups of fields:

  1. personal data (ip, referral, user agent, camera & microphone names, anonymization status)
  2. data on output files, including the public https URL for the main output file (transcoded .mp4 or raw recording) if it is hosted by us

All dates & times are in UTC. Sizes are in bytes. Lengths are in seconds.

After logging in to your Pipe account dashboard, navigate to the Account section and then click on the Export tab in the top navigation bar:

The new Export page in the Pipe account dashboard

You can also navigate directly to the new export page using the following URL:

https://dashboard.addpipe.com/export

Select the date range and the environments for which you want the data to be exported (defaults to all) and click on Queue export.

When the export is ready, you'll receive an e-mail notification at the account e-mail.

To download the export you'll have to visit https://dashboard.addpipe.com/export again. Click on the Download button corresponding to the export. The export will download to your local computer as an archived .csv file. Extract the .zip archive to obtain the uncompressed .csv file.

The exported data/file is not included in the notification e-mail because:

  1. the export can contain personal data, e-mails are easily forwarded, the data touches unintended servers and inboxes
  2. the files can get quite big

Export files/archives are deleted from our storage automatically after 14 x 24 hours have passed since the export file has been created.  This is the only way to delete the exports at this moment.