Twitter, Please, I’m Begging You… Give Us A Way To Backup Our Data

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009 at 8:30 pm

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Yes, Twitter was just down. Like me, I’m sure that every time the network freezes or disappears completely you fear the absolute worst.

The thing is, one day, inevitably, something awful will happen. Servers will crash, hackers will run riot, and data will be lost. Your data.

I’m reminded once again why a facility to both backup and (critically) restore your tweets is nothing short of essential. Nobody likes the idea of having to start over. Particularly if it’s not your fault.

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Mark
It's an interesting conundrum. Should backups be entrusted to Twitter or the users themselves? Ideally, both. Given how Google is now indexing tweets and weighting them quite heavily, one wonders what would happen to all that Google-generated traffic should Twitter's server be wiped of tweets overnight.

Another thing to consider, if users are capable of restoring their own backups, is what happens is a user decides to alter the data in that backup. It's one thing to go back and edit a blog post from two years ago, but would the ability to effectively rewrite your Twitter history be a step too far? What if someone rewrote all 5,000 of their tweets to include a single link or a keyword dump?

I guess Twitter could include some sort of hash key with the backup to ensure data isn't tampered with prior to a subsequent restoration.

Personally, I consider my tweets to be as ephemeral as something like IRC, or some IM systems, rather than something worthy of archiving like emails or blog articles. For me, tweeting is an "of the moment" means of communication rather than one "for posterity", so I wouldn't feel too concerned if my previous tweets suddenly disappeared. But I can see how other people would feel differently.

Some food for thought.
.-= Mark´s last blog ..Retro vs Modern (MSNBC Lays Down the Smack II: Smack Harder) =-.

Sheamus
It's less about a desire to preserve all my 'great work' and more about not wanting to be on the receiving end of something nasty that I can then do nothing about. If all my tweets, friends and followers got wiped, as well as all the metadata that surrounds these things, it would be more than a little annoying. It's the 'starting over' part that is the main concern.

I would propose that backups are done automatically by Twitter and then saved on an entirely separate server, and can only be restored if there's a problem. This may already be happening, but it would be nice to know. I'd also like to be able to save the data locally on the off-chance everything Twitter's side goes bye-bye.