This made me think of backing up online EA content. It’s not that hard to automatize backing up the content on the EA Forum, the EA Hub and the websites of CEA, GiveWell and other organizations. Not all movement collapse scenarios involve loosing access to online content and communication platforms, but it may be part of both internal conflict scenarios and external shocks.
Our database provider provides backups automatically. I would be very surprised if they lost it. I think the largest remaining risk is that I accidentally issued a command to delete everything. In that worst case scenario, I’d be able to get one-off copies of the database that I’ve made at various points.
There’s still a single point of failure at the level of my organization. If something (maybe a lawsuit? seems unlikely) were to force us to intentionally take the site down, you’d want to have backups outside of our control. For that you might want to see this question, which your comment may have prompted.
Can’t you release the backups on torrent in the event of a legal shutdown? Without actually admitting that you “leaked” the data, of course. Considering how successful piracy has been, making a first-party backup persist on the net seems like a low hanging fruit to me.
This made me think of backing up online EA content. It’s not that hard to automatize backing up the content on the EA Forum, the EA Hub and the websites of CEA, GiveWell and other organizations. Not all movement collapse scenarios involve loosing access to online content and communication platforms, but it may be part of both internal conflict scenarios and external shocks.
Is the EA Forum regularly backed up, Aaron?
Short answer: Yes.
Our database provider provides backups automatically. I would be very surprised if they lost it. I think the largest remaining risk is that I accidentally issued a command to delete everything. In that worst case scenario, I’d be able to get one-off copies of the database that I’ve made at various points.
There’s still a single point of failure at the level of my organization. If something (maybe a lawsuit? seems unlikely) were to force us to intentionally take the site down, you’d want to have backups outside of our control. For that you might want to see this question, which your comment may have prompted.
Can’t you release the backups on torrent in the event of a legal shutdown? Without actually admitting that you “leaked” the data, of course. Considering how successful piracy has been, making a first-party backup persist on the net seems like a low hanging fruit to me.
No. The backups contain data like user emails and private messages that are, well, private. We expose all our public information over our API.