Backup Stack Exchange Tor site

[lunar]

It looks like we are going live with the Tor Stack Exchange Q&A site. There is going to be a lot of valuable thoughts in there, and it is probably a good idea to have our own backups in case Stack Exchange falls, fails or bails on the Tor project.

It should probably be done using a query run regularly against ​http://data.stackexchange.com/ or maybe using the data dumps ​http://www.clearbits.net/creators/146-stack-exchange-data-dump

[arma]

Good thinking.

[weasel]

I agree that somebody should do it. I'm not certain why you think the people taking care of our torproject.org hosts must be the ones doing it.

[lunar]

I assumed there was already a backup system in place for torproject.org hosts with disk space, rotation and verification procedures. Under that assumption, it made sense to put the data in the same place as other backups to me.

[weasel]

There is, for hosts. Hacking it up to support other stuff isn't trivial.

[lunar]

I have to shoot in the dark given I have no clue about the current system. If one of torproject.org host with enough disk space would retrieve information from StackExchange in a regular enough fashion and write them in a directory that is part of the backup set, that should work, right?

[weasel]

Yes. Maybe somebody can do that on for instance perdulce? Maybe even keep a couple versions. How big can this data be, after all.

[weasel]

Not a sysadmin task.

[lunar]

perdulce is backed up daily. So let's find a way write the freshest dump everyday in ~lunar/se-backup.

[lunar]

I was unable to retrieve anything from tor.stackexchange.com from data.SE. I have just sent an email to team@stackoverflow to ask what could be done.

[lunar]

Answer from the StackExchange team:

We don't put beta sites into the data explorer, because it takes a bit of work to set them up; this is something we do once the site graduates. If we were to close the site for _any_ reason (which is also _extremely_ unlikely), we'd provide you with a full data dump that you could reconstruct all non-deleted content with.
Our own backup policy (everything eventually lands on tape, real time SQL replication between data centers, daily or better DB backups) guarantees that we're not going to lose the content prior to it being included in our periodic data dumps, which also happens once a site has graduated.

Let us know if you have any additional concerns - you don't need to worry about your content, we've got it covered.

Sure, it's covered, but it's not on hard drives we control… :(

[teor]

Set all open tickets without a severity to "Normal"

[cypherpunks]

Please don't vandalize, and FWIW I see that StackExchange has its own archives: ​http://http://archivebyd3rzt3ehjpm4c3bjkyxv3hjleiytnvxcn7x32psn2kxcuid.onion/download/stackexchange/tor.stackexchange.com.7z