Mmmm. Not only should we be able to make backups, I reckon we should make the database dumps publicly available so that anyone can bring up a new site if they want/need to. Wikipedia does this, for example, allowing people to copy the entire Wikipedia to their own hard drives or make another copy of it in another country if they want. I wrote a bit of an article touching on how that could be done, which is linked from http://damned-colonial.livejournal.com/414885.html if you're interested.