couple new stickers in the store
https://store.mollywhite.net/products/im-not-hoarding-im-archiving-sticker
datahoarder
I'm looking for some #DataHoarder #DataBackup advice.
I maintain four different websites on a local server and three different groups on groups.io for an obscure motorcycle with a cult following. The previous maintainer passed away several years ago. Luckily he knew it was coming a few months before he passed and gave me his login credentials to the server much of this used to be hosted on and the old Yahoo! Listservs that I converted to groups.io.
One website uses WordPress and includes motorcycle content plus my own personal blog and portfolio, and is currently about 150gb. The other three sites are custom php with SQL back ends.
For the groups.io sites, I think it's a matter of identifying people I trust in the motorcycle community to make co owners of the groups. I already have someone doing moderator duties with me but I haven't found anyone willing to be a co-owner who also is known to the community and trusted. This also comes with the burden of paying the annual subscription fee of $110 (we got grandfathered in at this relatively low price).
For the websites, each lives on a VM inside a proxmox server sitting on a shelf at my house. I do run a nightly backup job to an on premises ProxMox backup server and weekly cold storage backups to a spinning disk drive plus every three or so months I push a backup of the VMs to a cloud storage account. But accessing any of these backups requires account credentials and two factor authorization which requires that I be involved. And I haven't found anyone with the interest and technical expertise to do something with these VMs to keep websites up if I were to expire or have a house fire or whatever.
I have used a plugin on the WordPress site to try and make sure everything is on the Internet Archive but I haven't done anything about it on that custom php sites.
I should note that the custom php sites contain backups of old mailing lists and the old yahoo groups dating back to 1994 in one case. And surprisingly people still occasionally refer to those ancient messages.
All of this information is effectively the collective brain trust of thousands of people who have owned this particular motorcycle over the decades. The knowledge is still useful today. It's actually probably more useful than it was 20 years ago because very few mechanics will touch these bikes now that they've been out of production for almost 30 years. We're on our own to do all maintenance both minor and major.
So I'm not really sure how to put together a succession plan for all of this information. Especially since even though I'm in my 40s and have owned one of these motorcycles for about 20 years, I'm still one of the youngest riders.