Is there a backup plan in case XDA shuts down?

The history of the Internet is unfortunately littered with websites shutting down with little to no notice, taking decades of volunteer contributions with them. Burned down like the library of Alexandria.

Examples include NixCraft in 2015, Yahoo Answers in 2021, Club MyCE in 2022, and forum.bodybuilding.com in 2024. This is not limited to online forums. Social networks such as Google Plus, video platforms such as VidMe, URL shortening services such as goo.gl, MySpace blogs in 2013, and many more shut down, often times with little notice.

Sources for Club MyCE: Reddit, Confused Bird, VideoHelp.

When NixCraft shut down, they left behind this unapologetic notice:





My question would be, if the XDA Forum ever plans to shut down, how long in advance will there be a notice?

Will there be a read-only period before shutting down entirely so people have time to save relevant stuff from the "burning building"?

Will a text dump of all user contributions be released like Wikipedia and Stack Overflow do? Text compresses very well, so all text contributions probably fit within a few gigabytes.

I for one hope none of this will become necessary of course, but these are things that need to be considered preemptively, not when it is too late. We should leave something behind for the world.

EllieCat said:

Have you heard of the Wayback machine?

Click to expand...

Click to collapse

It's not searchable by text and by far doesn't have full coverage of all posts. You can only get to a page if you have the URL. And it's not even guaranteed to stay. It has been under attack in recent times.