Has anyone successfully backed up more than 10000 items by deleting entries. From the API documentation, you can delete entries via the API, but you can also undelete them if you keep the entry id. That seems to indicate that the entries are still there and therefore, the API wouldn't allow you to retrieve additional entries. - Greg GuitarBuster

Adding a comment does change the order of the entries, thus allowing you to retrieve them. Very time consuming to do manually, but there's an API for writing comments. - Greg GuitarBuster

Oh nevermind, I just found a hole in my brain. I was going to suggest retrieving a list of entries via the API, then add a comment to those beyond the 10000th, but you can't retrieve that entry anyway. - Greg GuitarBuster

I have in the past, December 2012, recovered ~19000 posts, using the method of deletion. The API has an artificial limit, on the query, and doesn't query against the posts flagged as deleted. So deleting posts pull new (old) content inside the API window. - OCoG of FF, Jimminy

Oh okay, thanks Jimminy - Greg GuitarBuster

So it might be possible to write a script to retrieve 'n' entries, delete each entry while also saving the ids to a file. Retrieve additional entries and maybe(?) even restore the deleted entries after a complete backup - Greg GuitarBuster

Yes, which is what I did, for myself, though I just let the old stuff vanish from the site, and brought some of it back when I wanted to reference it. The cost becomes substantial, after the first 10000 items. Every page of 100 items, requires 100 + 1 requests, which makes it 100 times more costly, or 200 times if you want to bring that data back. - OCoG of FF, Jimminy