We sent an email to some of our Kickstarter backers yesterday, giving people a chance to check out Micro.blog again if they haven’t been active recently. The platform has improved so much in the last year. It’s possible that it didn’t meet someone’s needs a year ago but will today.
One of the links in the email was to the 12 days of microblogging help page, which links to 12 blog posts I wrote in December to highlight how people are using Micro.blog. Unfortunately, most of those links no longer worked! I scrambled to figure out why some of the links on my blog weren’t working, finally discovering that I had broken them myself when testing the Medium.com import feature across multiple test blogs.
In the process, I decided to pull a complete backup of Micro.blog’s database from 30 days ago and use it to fix some of my old blog posts. This was a great exercise. I check the backups from time to time, but it’s rare that I need to go over specific data by hand and actually restore anything.
Last week, Myspace revealed that they had lost all hosted music from 2003 - 2015. I don’t think we can be too careful with the responsibility of hosting people’s blogs, so I’m glad I had this chance for a real-world test of Micro.blog’s backups. (I also recommend enabling the Internet Archive feature under Posts → Design, and occasionally downloading a complete archive of your blog from Posts → Export.)
