I really seriously think thor's idea there is a great one.

Simply make !backup a public command, and anytime someone finishes an epic construction or goes to bed for the night, they can !back it up.

If I'm not mistaken !backup outputs the number, and if it's particularly important we can use it as a reference here in the forum. eg:

1841: Finished construction of the epic statue of weasel. Let us all kneel towards it every day at noon.

During busy times we might advance several numbers in a few hours, but if everyone sees the "backup saved" notification it shouldn't have much opportunity to be abused.

And those that do abuse: unwhitelist

this also let's us hold on to momentous snapshots of history, and maybe oneday using Isocraft or somesuch, we can do a timelapse animated gif

May the humble, non-playing peasants be treated with screenies?

It's not 1841 yet. : (

Also, update on the Thorvian Coliseum. The plebeian seating and entrances are completed. Now onto the VIP Skyboxes.

That's the thing, I did do that. That exact logic actually. MD5 changed with each map save, not sure why. I run a local server that has no players on it, and it still backed up.

EDIT: Plebian backups sound ok. I'll add a player stamp to it as well for the server logs.
Until I get this no-players-on thing working I won't update the server though, so continue to do what you want without fear of loss.

EDITEDIT: Ok, done, going to shut down the server for a replacement of the wrapper software. Yes I will warn anybody currently on, sheesh. What do you take me for, imagination?

EDITEDITEDIT: Software changed, everybody can rejoin now.

I'm halping

WANT SO MUCH.

EDIT: View at night of the server from my island.

Have 3 hard backups updated every hour for periods with no players on the server

add a once per ten minutes public !backup flag

disassociate filenames of the two backups cleanly

if someone "griefsaves" over the !backup backups you can revert to before any changes occured, no problem

Why bother backing up when there is nobody there?

Power outages, random BSoD's, unforseen calamaties. As a precaution. But make it once or twice an hour if no one is there. No need to suck up space so quickly.

hey i can see my colliseum start from duh's view.

Oh hi there floating island #2

because unless you're keeping an infinite number of !backup backups it'd be possible to "grief" the !backup system and overwrite all hard saves

you back up while no one is there immediately after and right before anyone joins but since you can't tell when someone is joining you just do it every hour

it's a redundancy thing

Ahh, 'twas a beauty.

And I can see my boundaries from there.

My arena looks B.A. from that angle.

ahahah that second floating island is so funny. when i post this, grass still hasn't made it to the island's body (so the trees haven't grown either)
looks pretty barren.