We have added a few new buttons to the toolbar of the notebook on mybinder.org:
Try it out with one of our demo repositories. To learn more keep reading 
The new toolbar gives you some options for downloading your notebook after the Binder session has ended. It will be automatically installed when you (re)build your repository.
On mybinder.org we have a (very) short timeout for sessions. So short, that going for a short coffee break is likely to have your session ended before you get back. This is frustrating for people, especially in a course/workshop setting. The reason it is configured like this is that the vast majority of sessions are started by people who go away again quickly.
To help with this we now install https://github.com/manics/jupyter-offlinenotebook by default. This extension allows you to download your notebook even after the server has stopped or you have disconnected from the internet.
This means as long as you have the tab open you can save your work by clicking the big “Download” button. That is it.
There are two additional buttons (they look like “clouds”). These allow you to save your notebook to your browser’s internal storage. Then at a later point in time you can overwrite the notebook with the one from the browser storage. One situation we hope this will be useful for is when your Binder session has ended but you want to continue working on the notebook.
When your Binder session ends you would:
- store the notebook to your browser’s storage by clicking the left-hand cloud
- restart your binder session
- open the original notebook
- restore the notebook from your browser’s storage
You can now continue to work on your notebook. A short video of this (with the “restart Binder” step removed for brevity):
I first add a new cell, add something to it, store the notebook, then continue editing it and then restore the notebook from the previous state stored in my browser’s storage.
We have tested the extension on Firefox and Chrome. However browser compatibility across operating systems is hard. So please report things that don’t work and if you happen to know how to fix them: please do make a Pull Request
This extension is one of our ideas for solving the problem that mybinder.org has no persistence. It is a work in progress (what isn’t). We worked on it because people gave us feedback about what worked well and what didn’t work well. This is crucial for us because we don’t spy on our users and you are spread around the globe so we meet far too few of you. Please keep the feedback coming.
Happy Friday everyone!