Is it working?
What runs where, what happens to your journal if something breaks, and what we won't promise.
Live status
Check the status page. It's hosted away from our servers and checked from outside our network every few minutes — so it can still answer you on a day when we can't.
Where it runs
Too Hard Pile runs as a single small application server, behind Cloudflare. Your account and everything you write live in one database on a persistent disk attached to that server. It's a deliberately plain setup: fewer moving parts means fewer things that can break in ways nobody understands at midnight.
How your writing is backed up
Once a day the entire database is snapshotted — a proper consistent copy, taken safely while the app is still running and being written to, not a file copy that might catch a half-finished write. Seven days of those snapshots stay on the server.
A copy of each also goes off the server entirely, into Cloudflare R2 storage, where it's encrypted at rest. That off-site copy is the one that actually matters — it's what survives if the server and its disk are lost together.
What keeps working when something breaks
Not every failure takes down everything, and it's worth knowing which is which. The drills and the Decision Toolbox are built from files rather than the database, and using them doesn't require an account — so if the database is unavailable, you can still read, still practise, and still use every tool in the Toolbox. What stops is anything attached to you: signing in, saving to your journal, and progress tracking.
If the whole service is unreachable, nothing on this domain will load, including this page. That's exactly why the status page lives somewhere else.
Why there's no uptime guarantee here
We don't publish an uptime promise. A number like that is only meaningful with something behind it — service credits, an error budget, somebody paid to be awake at 3am — and we'd rather say plainly that we're small than print a figure we can't stand behind. What we do publish is measured rather than promised: the status page shows what actually happened, including the bad days.
Your copy beats our backup
From Settings you can export everything — journal, digs, progress — as a JSON file, any time, without asking us. We think you should. However carefully anyone runs a service, the most reliable copy of your own thinking is the one you hold. If Too Hard Pile is carrying decisions that matter to you, take an export occasionally.
Questions
If something looks wrong, or you want more detail than this page gives, write to [email protected] — a real person reads it. Too Hard Pile is a product of BlackShip Developers.