Fediverse @lemmy.world FundMECFSResearch @lemmy.blahaj.zone 7d ago

"Backup" your fedi account, when not self hosting?

Hi, I’m not self hosting, but I’ve realised I’ve spent a decent amount of time on this social media, and written a few things I may want to revisit in the future.

I was wondering if there was a way to “back up” my account, so if something happened to my host instance, I would still be able to have a copy of the comments and posts I made :).

I’m not expecting to be able to “transfer” my account to a new one, but have a backup of posts and comments for personal storage, having a copy on my harddrive.

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Which service? Mastodon has a built-in export functionality in preferences.

I can't find such an option on Lemmy, but you should be able to do a GDPR request for your information as a last resort.

edit: Non-post data / user settings can be exported (and imported!) but posts are a separate issue. See this open issue.
- I'm not a lawyer, but since Lemmy instances aren't "professional or commercial activity", I doubt a GPDR request would be applicable.
  
  Some people who run instances might have the ability to do some sort of database export for a specific user, but the vast majority of us are just barely technical enough to keep Lemmy running and updated.
  
  The last time I touched our database I accidentally wiped out all data older than 1 month and had to restore a backup.
  
  I think we do have the option to remove a user by purging them through the UI, but an export isn't an option at this point.
  
  IIRC this was already addressed and should be automatic.
  There was an issue specifically mentioning GDPR and the devs implemented a way to automatically delete the data of an account within the given time.
  
  It's not a GDPR request in itself, but AFAIK a normal delete account request should be compliant... INAL
- Wondering about Lemmy specifically. I know there’s an export option for settings though.
  
  I recently had to move, because my previous instance is shutting down. I got to keep all of my settings and the commubities I follow. It also kept blocked accounts and communities, but not blocked instances.
  
  ETA: Comments were not transferred and I'm assuming posts won't be either.
  
  Yeah, I know that’s not possible as of now. Just wondering if there is a simpler way to get a copy of my comments and posts than using a web scraper.
  
  That definitely sounds like a feature that should be added. I remember when you couldn’t even export your subscriptions.
  
  I was editing my comment as you were responding. Check the issue on GitHub I linked in the edit, and maybe thumbs it up for visibility. One of the commenters mentions using a third-party tool but I'm not sure the one they linked to can grab posts. In theory another one might exist to dump your post data.
  
  Thanks that’s helpful. I’ll wait it out I guess as I’m not upto tinkering with the API right now.

10 comments