Automated atproto backups

[erlend-sh]

https://medium.com/@storacha/introducing-bsky-storage-own-your-social-identity-aa386944e7c7

If you’re building an app other than Bluesky on the AT Protocol, we’d love to talk to you about bundling automated backups into your subscriptions — because bsky.storage is implemented against the AT Protocol it comes with built-in support for any ATProto app.

Account and Identity

Our answer to the call is that Roomy can handle this well:

Account Backups: services and tools to help backup account data and identity control. This could be things like cronjobs which do daily repo CAR file and "blob" backups to an S3-compatible bucket, or Shamir secret sharing between friends to recover PLC rotation keys. Monitoring and alerting for unexpected account changes.

PLC Rotation Key Management: most users in the network today do not have complete control over their network identity, because they have not registered a locally-controlled rotation key. Getting everyday users in control of their identities will take work, but the first steps are to increase accessibility of this to developers, technical users, and high-profile / high-value accounts. This could include command line tools, integrations in password managers and "wallets", support or plugins for hardware enclaves, as well as tutorials and guides to security best practices.

Account Data Exports: the current repo export format is CAR files. These are complete, app-neutral, can be used for account migration, and have a well documented format. They can be processed with tools like 'goat', but are not particularly accessible for many users. More accessible tools to convert and explore CAR exports would be helpful: indexing into sqlite, converting to spreadsheets (CSV) or JSON, displaying and browsing bsky posts, etc.

key rotation / recovery key

Privacy

If folks want to implement less-visible content in atproto projects today, we recommend doing what we did for the temporary Bluesky Chat DMs system: implement a [de-]centralized server and talk to it over Lexicon APIs using service proxying (aka, service authentication). In the future, when private data is ready to use, it should be possible to have users migrate their content over.

Roomy/Leaf can supplement ATproto with several privacy facilities.

[zicklag]

Ah, yeah, we've got a different situation because all of our actual data lies in Jazz, off of ATProto, but we do still need backups.

That's what I'm working on with Sedimentree right now.

[erlend-sh]

ATproto backups

This might make a good extension for Roomy:

https://github.com/Turtlepaw/atproto-backup

https://bsky.app/profile/jacob.gold/post/3lweosvgkts24

[zicklag]

We have S3 backups on the latest version of Roomy with our new Leaf server.

I just need to do some more serious restore tests to make sure that it's working.

[erlend-sh]

This issue ended up being about how we could potentially build an add-on service to Roomy for atproto backups, e.g. in partnership with bsky.storage or other such providers. So I've changed the title to reflect that and will move this to discussion.

[erlend-sh]

https://retrobailey.leaflet.pub/3m3ntnjv3hc2x

There’s great open tooling for this now. All we’d need to do is make our own Roomy-native UI flow for it.