Are there air gapped backups, in case, say, someone with a grudge against rationalists or EAs decided to take Lightcone down and try to destroy every record they can? It would really suck to lose the whole history of LW. I don’t know what mirrors exist, or how vulnerable they might be to a determined attacker.
There are many many backups of public content (including things like archive.org and archive.is and other people who have taken their own backups).
I don’t think we have any air-gapped backups of private content, though I am sure I have some random old DB backups lying around in some random cloud drives somewhere, or an old laptop of mine.
I encourage anyone with files they’d rather not lose (photos, taxes, passwords, etc.) to start making rotating offline backups. Find some big enough USB drives (flash or spinning are both fine) and buy ~5. Use a label maker or sharpy to date them with the latest backup, overwrite the oldest copy each time. Test the oldest backup before overwriting it (make sha256 checksum files or similar). Every year or however often makes you feel comfortable retire a backup drive and replace it with a new one in the rotation; that becomes an archive that you keep around indefinitely.
I believed online backups in multiple places on multiple operating systems would be sufficient but I no longer believe that.
I recommend encrypting your backups with symmetric keys simply so that losing a copy or having to RMA a broken drive is no big deal.
Technical note: I recommend open source tools like restic or the Rust version rustic for backups. In my memory, I know Restic is innovative and better than what came before, but I had not memorized why. So I asked Claude for a summary, and it generated this, which jogged and enhanced my memory (which feels like one sweet spot for LLM-assisted thinking, in my opinion):
<div class=”llm-content-block” data-model-name=”Claude Opus 4.6″>
<div class=”llm-content-block-content”>`
Traditional backup tools deduplicated at the file or fixed-block level, so any insertion shifted all subsequent blocks and broke dedup. Restic uses content-defined chunking: a rolling hash (Rabin fingerprint) sets chunk boundaries based on content, not position. Edits only invalidate nearby chunks.
Beyond this, restic eliminates the full/differential/incremental distinction — every snapshot is logically complete, no restore chains. Encryption is mandatory, not optional. Multiple storage backends (S3, SFTP, local) are first-class. Borg had comparable dedup earlier but assumed Python and SSH; restic shipped as a static Go binary targeting cloud storage.
</div>
</div>
Note: I use the Markdown editor. Apparently I didn’t get the LLM markup quite right. I’d appreciate pointers on how to do that. Please share them as comments over on this comment. Once I learn how to do it properly, I will update this comment.
Are there air gapped backups, in case, say, someone with a grudge against rationalists or EAs decided to take Lightcone down and try to destroy every record they can? It would really suck to lose the whole history of LW. I don’t know what mirrors exist, or how vulnerable they might be to a determined attacker.
There are many many backups of public content (including things like archive.org and archive.is and other people who have taken their own backups).
I don’t think we have any air-gapped backups of private content, though I am sure I have some random old DB backups lying around in some random cloud drives somewhere, or an old laptop of mine.
I encourage anyone with files they’d rather not lose (photos, taxes, passwords, etc.) to start making rotating offline backups. Find some big enough USB drives (flash or spinning are both fine) and buy ~5. Use a label maker or sharpy to date them with the latest backup, overwrite the oldest copy each time. Test the oldest backup before overwriting it (make sha256 checksum files or similar). Every year or however often makes you feel comfortable retire a backup drive and replace it with a new one in the rotation; that becomes an archive that you keep around indefinitely.
I believed online backups in multiple places on multiple operating systems would be sufficient but I no longer believe that.
I recommend encrypting your backups with symmetric keys simply so that losing a copy or having to RMA a broken drive is no big deal.
Technical note: I recommend open source tools like restic or the Rust version rustic for backups. In my memory, I know Restic is innovative and better than what came before, but I had not memorized why. So I asked Claude for a summary, and it generated this, which jogged and enhanced my memory (which feels like one sweet spot for LLM-assisted thinking, in my opinion):
<div class=”llm-content-block” data-model-name=”Claude Opus 4.6″>
<div class=”llm-content-block-content”>`
Traditional backup tools deduplicated at the file or fixed-block level, so any insertion shifted all subsequent blocks and broke dedup. Restic uses content-defined chunking: a rolling hash (Rabin fingerprint) sets chunk boundaries based on content, not position. Edits only invalidate nearby chunks.
Beyond this, restic eliminates the full/differential/incremental distinction — every snapshot is logically complete, no restore chains. Encryption is mandatory, not optional. Multiple storage backends (S3, SFTP, local) are first-class. Borg had comparable dedup earlier but assumed Python and SSH; restic shipped as a static Go binary targeting cloud storage.
</div>
</div>
Note: I use the Markdown editor. Apparently I didn’t get the LLM markup quite right. I’d appreciate pointers on how to do that. Please share them as comments over on this comment. Once I learn how to do it properly, I will update this comment.