Im likely closing my instance soon due to costs and im sad my comments will disappear and remove and context and replies to them breaking many threads. Is it possible to preserve the comments someway or maybe migrating the comments to a another instance?
Just go ahead and close your instance. Your comments are already federated in other instances and will not go away. Example in lemmy.world: https://lemmy.world/u/nix@merv.news
You might want to keep the database and pictrs backup so you can later resurrect the instance again when you found some cheap hosting deals in e.g. lowendtalk.
Oh I thought closing the instance sent a delete request to all instances to delete all user data.
Do you know a way I can backup the database without any of the pictrs data and still be able to resurrect the instance? We didnt really upload images anyways and id rather keep the backup small making it more likely i can resurrect the instance in the future when i get more money and find cheaper hosting
I’m pretty sure it would still work, but images for media content would have broken links. I’m not sure the refresh policy as far as remote media goes but local stuff could be re-uploaded and it should be able to retain things like the user names and comment data even without pictures.
I’m actually not sure about that. You might want to test it yourself on your own server before shutting it down for good. See if you can bring up lemmy again after renaming the pictrs directory to simulate deletion.