However, before our last online event, one of the support team deleted one of the discussions forum by accident and could not retrieve it. This made me feel concerned about the restoration and backup procedures on Ning. If our network continues developing and being successful and then its contents are accidentally lost, there will be a lot of very unhappy members and an even more annoyed creator.
In order to avoid this I started investigating and digging into the existence of any restore or backup functions by exploring the admin features, looking at help centre questions and contacting other network creators and developers. My finding was that there are no restore functions implemented for a network creator to restore deleted contents. Ning provides backups of the content and code on social network on a daily basis which can be restored in the case of a catastrophic production incident. At present we do not have control over backups so we trust Ning to cover our backs.
On the other hand, Ning allows us to access the source code of our validation support network on their server and maintain it by ourselves so it becomes our responsibility to backup our data (i.e. exporting them to Spreadsheet which can not be restored) Please see the script below to be integrated into our network site.
If we take this approach there is no guarantee that Ning will maintain several copies of our source code or content for restoration in the case of a developer accident or user error. In other words if we delete code or content, the deleted version of our social network will replace the backup before we'll be able to get to it! For this reason, we need to keep our content backed up and our code in a code management tool like subversion. This can be a time-consuming task and because my role is to cultivate the community of practice rather than undertaking development works I will not be able to supervise the network technically. I agreed with Sue L to leave this issue for the time being until I have some spare time in the life-cycle of the project.
From a personal point of view I think Ning should look at this issue more seriously and consider easier and more efficient backup processes for network creators.
