If you download the standard package, it installs a demo logbook on your computer which you can use as a personal logbook. It uses port 8080 by default, although this can be changed. Then only thing you need to do is to make sure that port 8080 is blocked on your firewall. Read your OS documentation on how to set-up and use a firewall. Once you block port 8080, the data cannot be accessed from outside your laptop. 

You can start the elogd daemon even when you don't have internet access, and access your database locally under http://localhost:8080. For changing the title of a logbook, please read the documentation. 

There is a simple way. In your logbook directory you will find files of the format xxyyzza.log where xxyyzz is the year/month/day of the entries being submitted during that day. The attachments have a similar form, they have just the attachment name appended to the date. To back it up, just copy or tar all files of that directory. If you want to back up a certain year, you can select 2009 for example with 09*.*  To restore these files, simply untar them into the directory and restart the elogd daemon. The restart is necessary, since during start the daemon indexes all entries. 

Unfortunately not to my knowledge. The underlying editor FCKEdit has however certain styles etc., and one might maybe be able to tweak that, but I never figured out how.  

The logbook name is in the URL of your browser. In the demo installation, there is a link in the start menu pointing to http://localhost:8080/demo.  If you rename your logbook to something else, you have to change the URL accordingly. The simplest thing is to point it to http://localhost:8080, then you will be presented with a list of available logbooks.

The documentation says:

• Preset text = <string> or <file>
  This preset value is used for the main body text. It can be a string or a file, which must be present in the logbook directory. Alternatively, an absolute path can be used if the file name starts with a "/" (Unix) or "\" or "x:" (Windows).

and there is nothing to add. There is no special syntax on that file, it just gets copied 1:1 into the edit box. 

There are several ways:

1) Use conditional attributes (see https://midas.psi.ch/elog/config.html#conditional). If you have several standard entries, put the into the option list of a "type" attribute. Then depending on that value, you can pre-populate other attributes/options. This is then not a single-button solution, but a single-click plus one selection from a drop-down list solution which should be pretty close.

2) You can make a bookmark in your browser. Take the URL of the logbook, add "?cmd=New" and then for each attribute you can select a preset value using "&p<attribute>=<value>". So for example on the demo logbook you can use

https://midas.psi.ch/elogs/Linux+Demo/?cmd=New&ptype=Routine&pcategory=General&pauthor=Ellis 

which opens the new entry dialog, and pre-set values for Type, Category and Author. Then you can make several bookmarks for different standard entries.

- Stefan

In principle you can adjust the number of lines shown in the summary text file with the option summary lines = x. If you increase that value, you start seeing some part of the reply. For elog itself  it is impossible to distinguish the reply text from the origial text, since some people use plain text like

with the reply sometimes below, sometimes above the original text. Other people use full HTML with tables (like in this forum), where it is very hard internally to distinguish between original and reply text. The easiest is not to quote the original text in replies, then you will see it always.