Why backups and data dumps are essential for a community platform to provide?
Before launching a community, you need to make sure that you can download all the data from the platform you chose and re-create the community based on the data dump. Technical glitches happen all the time and you risk losing everything in an instant if you don’t have a backup. Additionally, in some rare cases you may need to change the platform the community operates on. It is possible only if you can download the full dump of your data.
This is a fragment of a draft of the book “Lessons Learned While Working On Stack Overflow”. Read the full book on kindle or the paperback version.