I think the question should be restated as: how do you save to a file and load from a file? The use of localStorage means you can only have one version of a canvas per browser/device pair.

Maybe not ideal but you _could_ use the browser inspector and copy the data from local storage and send it around manually. Not suggesting this is a workable solution but if you just needed to get it off one computer to another.

Create a gist and support loading from a gist URL?

It's shareable between devices and people, and even editable if you pretty-print the JSON, rather than base64 encoding it.

I would probably support both options.

https://developer.github.com/v3/gists/#create-a-gist

put my contact info in a public gist and say goodbye to me as a business partner.

Yeah, good point.

You can make the gist non-public by default (set public=false), and perhaps gists are the wrong tool, but something akin to gists seem like a good way to do something like this. I know Dave Winer was using the DropBox API in this way for some of his outlining tools.

But your point is well made, one of the downsides of the "web" as a platform is that it's hard to know what happens with the data you save to a random web application. I've had experience with product managers loading entire customer lists of emails into random "email validation tool"s, which were clearly just honeypots for foolish people's data.

Could just offer downloading the data as JSON in a file as well as having it in local storage?

Why convert to Base64?

It seemed easier to deal with / parse out of local storage. Maybe it wasn't 100% necessary. It looks like it's caused bugs for non-latin characters.

Do you have a link to the bugs? I had never seen that before.

the fix: https://github.com/sbussard/canvas-sketch/pull/16

To save on bandwidth and storage, I would guess

By making it roughly 1/3 larger?

Oh yikes does it really? Ignore my misinformed comment...

An explanation here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64#Output_padding