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Comment by bityard | Hacker News Reader

There are plenty of cases where I want to own a thing, but make someone else responsible for managing it. And if they fail or go away, I want to know that I can hire someone else to manage it instead.

If the app is hosted entirely in the cloud, _everything_ is gone if the provider pulls the plug suddenly. If the app is hosted on a device that I own and the provider goes away, it will probably still keep working for a while. Worst case, I still at least have the option of hiring someone to crack it open and extract the data to import someone else.

This is such an important concept that it even has its own field of study and practice called "business continuity." Many business have legal agreements with customers and partners _requiring_ this.

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It's a given that you should have backups of your business data, no matter if you're using a hosted installation or a local one. With backups, if the hosted provider pulls the plug, you don't lose _everything_. You may be scrambling to set up the replacement but you have your data, and in this case you'd also have the source code, so you'll survive.

And keep in mind that "Raspberry Pi fails" is a more common scenario than "provider goes out of business", so from the perspective of minimizing the scramble, that's the one I'd be more concerned about.

A bit more about backups: for something truly important, you should have an offline copy, in case a malicious party compromises credentials that can be used to overwrite both the primary and the backup. I don't think you should depend on the vendor backing up your data. Some things you just have to do yourself, unfortunately.

Another commenter mentions the setup involves a Pi with an SSD and two USB sticks. It might be configured so you're required to switch usb sticks for consecutive backups, so you'd always have at least your second most recent backup completely offline - or even have the system ensure there's only a backup usb stick instead while the backup is running (and either unmount it of nag you to take it out when the backup is done).

I'll actually be sending out emails if there are more than 14 consecutive backups on the usb stick to remind the customer to switch them ;)

> Worst case, I still at least have the option of hiring someone to crack it open and extract the data to import someone else.

Even that worst "single person provider got hit by a bus" case is already somewhat mitigated here - since the software is open source.

I'm guessing she's likely set this up so anyone with physical access and appropriate credentials (which the client has by default) and linux experience, could manage/maintain the RasPi box and/or migrate everything to a self hosted version on a more "regular" linux box.

Everything important is backed up on the usb stick. The application can be set up on XAMPP or any other webserver with it.

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