Even with services that you absolutely trust (like us, we hope!) it's important to back up your data regularly and consistently, especially when that data represents your core audience, which might be the single greatest asset that you have as a creator.
To that end, we've added two new features to automations to make it really, really easy to have a great data posture with Buttondown without even having to lift a finger:
- The first one of these is a new trigger that fires automatically based on time. (If you're a software developer reading this, just think
cron.) You can use this trigger to fire off events every day, week, month, or even year. - The second one of these, which you probably have guessed by now, is a new automation action to create exports. These exports work the exact same way as you manually logging in and triggering an export. We zip up, literally and figuratively, all of your data for a given collection, such as subscribers or emails. Then we send you an email with a link to that export once we're all done.
It's not the most exciting thing in the world to talk about backing up your data, but it is really, really important. We want to make it as easy as possible for you to feel comfortable knowing that you always have access to your data. A stream of your subscriber information and, in some cases, your life work, ready to access at a moment's notice.
As a postscript, we're trying to think about other useful ways to take advantage of what are essentially cron-based automations. If there's anything that you'd like us to think about or build in this realm, please let me know!