I’m thinking about social media backups again after Prismo’s database loss and one of my own test blogs crashing.

I can and do automate backups on the VPS where I host my main blogs.

I can manually backup my social media accounts, but IIRC none of them offer automatic scheduling. I have to remember to run a backup, log into the site, find the right control panel (which sometimes changes!) and request a backup.

I’d like to be able to schedule recurring backups on Mastodon, Twitter, etc. Send me an email each month with a link when it’s ready.

OK, you don’t want to keep generating backups for abandoned accounts. Here are some ideas:

• Skip the process if I haven’t posted since the last archive.
• Instead of scheduling a recurring job, schedule a new one 30 days out each time I download an archive.

Refine as needed.

Now, those of us with a little more tech savvy can automate some things with IFTTT. Not the native backup process, but we can set up rules to listen for new posts and automatically save the content somewhere else. But while I can reliably save the text of every post from Twitter, Mastodon, etc., saving media depends on what I’m saving it to. Often the best you can do with IFTTT is embed, not copy. (And that’s if the media is even available in the source feed. Pixelfed’s RSS doesn’t include image URLs, and Mastodon’s RSS/Atom includes them in a way IFTTT doesn’t recognize.)

Eh, maybe I should just read up on ActivityPub and see if I can make a subscribe-to-archive bot.