Making emoncms data portable

I want to be able to log in the emoncms instance running on my local machine and go to a page where I can enter the authentication details and location of my account on a remote emoncms server such as emoncms.org at which point it would bring up a list of the feeds that are available and I could either download particular feeds or just click download all and it would automatically download the whole account.

This would allow me to get at my data when I'm offline and it could serve as a personal backup of the data. Another need for this feature is we have an old remote emoncms instance that has some old energy data on, this feature would make it really easy to move the data to the new instance.

This feature could also work in a similar way to a ubuntu one or dropbox like service, there could be an automatic syncing option.

This would make the energy data very portable, data potability helps to create an open web, ensures that we can be in full control of our energy data, we can remove it from a service if we no longer want to be with a particular service, use it in other applications and for other applications that may not have been thought of in the original application design.

Over the next few blog posts I'm going to try and explore how this can be implemented. I've already got some working code, but a lot of work will need to be done to make this a nice well implemented feature, so if you can help with the coding or/and provide insight into better ways of doing things, that would be most welcome.