If the Net is my hard drive, who is in charge of backups?

[drwex]

In an essay last month for WIRED, Bruce Schneier wrote about the vandalism of the Wine Therapy blog archives. The vandals destroyed many years' worth of information and postings, much of which was not backed up.

The riff on this, of course, is how does such a risk play out in user-content-creation sites. Like, oh, I dunno, take LiveJournal as a totally random example. What if SUP decides that it needs to protect or remove postings tagged with labels it deems inappropriate for its business model?

Regardless of any Terms & Conditions document, I'm guessing most LJers are of the opinion that they own their own content, even though it's posted to someone else's site. Without reading the T&C closely I can't tell you if SUP or anyone else shares that opinion. If an authority figure, or maybe just a really pissed-off cracker, decides to do something nasty to the servers and their data, it's not inconceivable that peoples' LJ contents could vanish overnight.

If we accept that we'd like to retain our own material against both the corporate demons of stupidity and the evil malcontents it seems incumbent on us to take steps to protect that content in some way. At the very least, dumping it down and backing it up in a manner of our choosing, right?

Anyone got a solution handy for this?

(I'm aware that simply dumping down one journal won't provide complete backup, if only because journals are cross-linked and even if you capture all the comments on all the entries you can't capture the things that you've linked to either directly or through memories. But let's take it one step at a time.)

Comments

[coraline]

http://www.ljbook.com/ doesn't generate the prettiest results, but it does put all the journal entries and comments in one place.
i wish it included more formatting and user icons, but...

and i also download the flat text month by month of just my entries, so i can have it for grepping (along with my mail with all my comments in).

[inahandbasket]

gah, beat me to it by 1 minute!

[inahandbasket]

For dumping I use http://www.ljbook.com/
Dumps your entire LJ into a giant PDF 'book.'
Which reminds me, I'm overdue for another backup of it.

[catness.livejournal.com]

Yup, what they said. I also export each month from both my journals.

[marmota.livejournal.com]

Once a month or so (ie, not as frequently as I intend), I run a batch script of ljsm against my entire friends list. Even after a few years of this, it's <10gb, and given how infrequently I read LJ is useful for grepping through for keywords like my name/nickname, events such as burning man or arisia, and so on. It's especially useful for catching up on communities that get overly enthusiastic about deleting controversial threads.

[caulay.livejournal.com]

Another alternative, for those comfortable with running a script to do it: LJDump (http://hewgill.com/ljdump/).

[darkrosetiger.livejournal.com]

I use LJ Archive. It works pretty well, and allows backups of communities as well as individual journals.

[woodwardiocom.livejournal.com]

I too use ljArchive, available at http://fawx.com/software/ljarchive/. And, of course, I have all LJ comments sent to my email, and archived.