Backing up your content

Your server holds two kinds of thing for you: your posts (the records: every post, like, follow, and profile edit) and your media (the photos and video attached to them, plus your avatar and banner). Obsign can keep a second copy of both, held by you in your own iCloud Drive, so a server that loses them, or goes away entirely, isn’t the end of the story.

Both backups are opt-in, per identity, and live side by side on the Media backup screen (reached from an identity’s detail view).

Why hold your own copy

Your server already backs its data up off-box (operators can read how in Backups & restore). That protects you if a file goes bad. It does not protect you if the server itself goes away: a host that shuts down, a volume lost with no restore point, an operator you no longer trust.

A backup you hold is the layer underneath all of that. It lives in your iCloud Drive, so it survives the server entirely. And because your posts reference media by content address — a hash of the bytes themselves — your copy is either exactly the file the post points at or it isn’t. There is no “close enough.”

Backing up your media

Open an identity and choose Back up media. The backup is:

Opt-in, per identity. Nothing is copied anywhere until you ask, and each identity is backed up on its own.
Incremental. The first run copies everything; later runs only fetch what’s new, so keeping it current is cheap.
Verified as it goes. Every file is checked against its content address before it’s written to the mirror, so a corrupted download is never stored as if it were good.

The current mirror size is always shown, and the copy is a normal folder you can see in the Files app. Nothing hidden, nothing you can’t inspect.

Keeping it fresh

Media you post keeps arriving after the first backup, so Obsign tops the mirror up on its own. On iOS a scheduled background task refreshes each opted-in identity’s mirror without you opening the app, running the same incremental, content-verified pass as Back up now. A photo posted days ago doesn’t sit unprotected until the next time you happen to launch Obsign, and each identity is handled independently, so one account’s failure never stops the others.

You stay in control of when that happens. A Media backup section in Settings lets you:

turn background backups off entirely (leaving only the manual Back up now),
restrict them to while charging, or
skip cellular data, so top-ups wait for Wi-Fi.

Restoring to your server

If your server loses the originals, open the identity and choose Restore to server. Obsign uploads your mirrored files back byte-for-byte. Media is content-addressed, so the restored files carry the same addresses they had before, and every post keeps pointing at the same media. Nothing in your posts is rewritten.

iOS sometimes offloads files from a full device to save space, leaving only a placeholder. A restore handles that for you: when a backed-up file isn’t actually on the phone, Obsign asks iCloud to download it, waits for it to arrive (within a time limit), verifies it still matches its content address, and uploads it. A restore on a device where most of the mirror has been evicted just works, instead of handing you a list of files to fetch by hand. The summary tells you how many files were pulled from iCloud first, so a slower restore explains itself. A file that’s genuinely gone, with no iCloud copy left to download, is reported on its own, and the restore continues past it.

During a migration

Your media backup also protects a move. When you migrate your identity away from a server that has already lost some of your media, that media would normally be left behind. If you’ve backed it up, Obsign falls back to your own copy: it verifies the backed-up file still matches its content address and uploads that to your new server. The substitution is exact, so a file your old server dropped shrinks the move’s loss list — and ideally empties it — instead of forcing you to skip it.

Backing up your posts

Your posts — the records themselves — are the one part of your account that otherwise lives only on your server. The same Media backup screen has a Back up your posts section that mirrors a full snapshot of your repository into your iCloud Drive.

A snapshot, not a stream. Each backup captures your whole repository as it stands, so the copy you hold is always a complete, self-contained record rather than a pile of fragments.
Integrity-checked before it’s kept. A snapshot is verified before it replaces the last one. If a freshly fetched copy fails the check, the previous good snapshot is left untouched; you are never left holding a corrupt backup.
Yours to keep and to move. The snapshot is a standard repository export you can hold and inspect, so the record of what you’ve written stays with you no matter what happens to the server that hosted it. Bringing it back is part of a move: the snapshot feeds a migration or recovery to a server, not a direct upload into your live account.

Together with your media backup, this means your whole presence — what you wrote and the images you attached — has a copy that you control.