As some of you know, I have my own blog outside of Steemit. I own my own domain and have a host to host my website. I used to have a free Wordpress site, but the limitations of Wordpress got to me, so I decided to self host. This did not come without its challenges. I started self hosting last year May and by September my host had gone bust. I couldn't get into my website at all anymore. After a long fight I was able to reclaim my domain name and start my website again, but I had lost 100 blog posts due to the fact that I did not keep any back ups of my website offline.
I have learnt my lesson, and now back up my blog every month and my website itself every time I make significant changes. I will not be caught out again. Losing all that work was heart wrenching and while I was able to rewrite a lot of the sex toy reviews, some of my short stories were forever lost, which really broke my heart.
Sadly, Steemit doesn't have a feature that allows you to back up your blog posts. Or if it does, I haven't found it yet (feel free to tell me in the comments though!). This means that, should anything happen to Steemit or your account, you could potentially lose all your blog posts. I highly doubt Steemit itself will keep a copy of your posts in one handy place to give to you should you wish to leave Steemit. All your hard work will then be lost. And that is really not a good thing.
My suggestion? Type all your blog posts in a Word document, and then copy and paste it into Steemit. At least that way you will have a copy of your posts should anything happen. I don't do this for all my blog posts, but you better believe I do it for most of them. I put a lot of time and effort into my posts and I would be devastated if I lost all those blog posts. Especially the short pieces of erotic fiction.
If I have learnt anything from my website disaster it's this: you cannot rely on anyone else to keep your content safe. No one will look out for you and especially on a platform like Steemit, where payouts stop after 7 days and people move on quickly, your content could disappear. Your work, time and effort is worth more than that. Don't lose it all: back it all up in Word (or whatever program you prefer) and if Steemit ever goes belly-up or decides to remove content older than x days, you still have your blog posts.
Well steem is a blockchain, and as such has many more backups than a website. It isn't hosted on one machine, it's hosted on every machine running a node.
So unless one early morning, suddenly all nodes vanish simultaneously, or somehow get corrupted, there is no way for your work to be lost.
That said, I agree you should probably back up your posts, even just for the fact that going back on steem blockchain to view all your past posts is a pain in the ass.
Thank you, that goes to show how little I know about blockchain. I do like having all my posts somewhere handy so I can refer back to them, so I will still keep them in Word format, but reassuring to know it won't just disappear overnight.
Yes, @poet has explained this :-) It's a blockchain! There is NO WAY we will lose our posts. Basically our posts are backed up on many many machines.
If you wanted to understand the 'risks' it's therefore not in losing, but in never being able to lose your posts. Everything you write and say on Steemit.com cannot be altered after 7 days - if you ever wanted to delete something it would not be possible.
We've arrived in a new era ;-)
That's very comforting to know. I still like having my posts, especially my stories, on my harddrive as well.
I keep my source HTML and files on my backed-up home PC. That is the record of truth. What I upload to my web host is a backup. And as the other commenters say, steemit lives on the steem blockchain. If one node crashes there are others. That's what it means by being distributed. That's also why it's considered censorship resistant.
Given that, why not post on your web page what you post on steem? And vice-versa. I have to do some catching up in that area as well.
science fiction, fantasy, erotica haven't seen you around in quite a while, why not stop at my blog and check out some stories? @joe.nobel