Backups

Guestbook messages are often irreplaceable: wedding wishes, a club's history, notes from readers who have long moved on. Here is how they are protected on our side, and how you keep a copy of your own.

Every night, off the server

The whole database is backed up every night. The backup is encrypted and stored away from the web server, in separate storage, and each one is kept for 30 days before it expires. If a backup fails, we are alerted by e-mail. On top of that, the server itself is snapshotted once a week, so the service could be rebuilt from scratch.

What backups are for

Backups exist to bring the whole service back after a disaster: a failed disk, a bad update, a broken server. They are not an undo button. When you delete a message or your account in the Control Panel, it is gone from the live service at once and from the backups within 30 days, and a deleted guestbook cannot be brought back. That is deliberate, because deletion should mean deletion; it also means you should download a copy before you delete anything you might want later.

Your own copy, any time

Account › Download My Data in the Control Panel gives you everything we hold: your account details and settings, every message including private and pending ones, your banned IP addresses and the notification e-mails we sent you, as one JSON file. The messages alone come as CSV as well, which opens in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets. The files are generated the moment you click; there is no request to send and nothing to wait for. Settings › Download › E-mails lists your visitors' e-mail addresses as a text file, and the RSS feed carries the latest ten public messages.

Keeping a guestbook for the long run

A guestbook stays online as long as it is being used. Under the Terms of Service a guestbook that holds messages is never deleted for being quiet; you do not have to log in to keep it, and a downloaded copy keeps it forever. See also reliability and privacy.