The website was down for about an hour for emergency maintenance. Daily backups are super important just in case, and the backup script was failing lately due to the size of the database.

I shaved off approx. 800 MB from the uncompressed database export which is pretty nice. This should allow daily backups to resume for at least a year without hiccups.

I considered writing an "archiving" script that would move inactive accounts to a separate database. Frankly, it's a lot of work, for practically no benefits.

Instead, I looked at purging very old, inactive accounts:

• Flashcards from accounts inactive for 2 YEARS.
• Private stories where the user's account was inactive for 5 YEARS.

In general when people return after one year of absence they want to delete all their cards and start over anyway so this was pretty conservative and likely affects nobody.

For stories, I looked at private stories only. Private stories are not shared or seen by anybody else. Still someone may spend a lot of time inputting stories and it's not unusual for people to come back after 1-3 years. So here I used a more sensible 5 year interval.

PS: keep in mind you can export your stories at any time should you take a long break and/or you don't know when you'll return.