History
Motivation
In early 2019, my Discord server was completely destroyed by a staff member. I woke up one day to find out that all channels, roles, everything was deleted, and the server was renamed to something... quite offensive to say the least.
The staff member was banned, but the damage was already done, and there was no way to recover any of the data.
It truly hurt to see all memories being gone. Since then, I was looking for a solution to back up the server in its full form, so in case something like this happens again, I can at least recover from it better.
Creation of marCloudBackup
During 2019 summer vacation, since no existing solution was fitting my use case, I created a bot that would create full backups of my server. I named it, according to the name of my server "marCloud", marCloudBackup.
Then I put together a simple website for it, and forgot about it.
Beginning of the problems
One year of focusing on high school and other projects later, I found out that 400 people were using it and that I had to "verify the bot" for it to keep being invitable.
Around the end of 2020 Discord has added the requirement for bots in more than 100 servers to be verified, thus I got an email.
I did not verify the bot, since sharing my government-issued ID felt extremely wrong (and still does to this day frankly speaking).
I'm heavily against sharing any personal information online, and since I am very much into privacy and security (and probably have some common sense), I knew something bad would happen if people shared their IDs (it did).
Instead, at the time I chose a more comfortable path, I created a clone of the bot, marCloudBackup_rel2, and deployed a cloned instance, making the database shared between the two.
That way, the demand could be served, and I could avoid sacrificing my privacy. I really wanted to keep on providing the service, since I knew how bad it feels to lose all your work. I just felt so uncomfortable with the idea of leaking my PII.
Growth
Since the first clone creation and notice of the user demand, I've put a lot of work into improving the bot.
I modified the copy-paste deployment into an automated scalable infrastructure, where adding a new bot instances was the matter of 2 clicks in the staff dashboard. The bot was turned into a distributed infrastructure with multiple microservices.
That allowed me to serve technically unlimited amounts of servers and users, without sacrificing performance or reliability.
In 2023, the bot has been rewritten and having resolved all bugs, we added a premium license with extra features to support the development and maintenance of the bot.
Users have asked us how could they support the bot, and how they could get more messages per channel. And that was the best way to do both of these things at the same time, while keeping the core functionalities free for everyone, like our initial vision of the bot.
Monetizing a project I truly cared about was a big step for me, but it was necessary to keep the bot running and improving, and I'm very thankful for everyone who has supported us by getting premium! 💙
All income was put into the server costs. And since the creation we have not had a single data or security breach, vulnerability, or any other issue that would put user data at risk.
The end?
At its peak, marCloudBackup was used by more than 7,500 servers and 6,500,000 users.
This has ended in late August 2025, when Discord terminated all marCloudBackup bot instances and my personal account, without any prior warning, citing "ban evasion" as the reason.
I woke up to over 100 emails from Discord, saying that I violated the developer policies. All personal contacts, friends, and work connections were lost, and I was left with no way to contact Discord or my users. Truly a nightmare to go through, can't recommend.
I have appealed the decision immediately, explaining the whole situation. Eventually after a few weeks I thankfully got my account back.
But, all the bot instances were already long gone.
I did not and do not want to do any form of ban evasion or circumvention of their rules. I was looking forward to working with Discord to find a solution that would let me bring the bot back in a compliant way.
Why terminated?
We don't know. Discord has not provided any specific reasons, and my follow-up questions about the specific reasons have not been answered either. That info itself would be very helpful to understand what went wrong and how to resolve it, to continue the service in a compliant way. But we got nothing to work with.
Some could say that my bot is a tool useful for people willing to do the mentioned ban evasion. But we do our best to fight abuse and non-compliant use of our service:
In 2021, we have created a content scanning system to automatically detect and block backups that contain content that breaks Discord's ToS and is overall harmful and abusive. The content scanner runs locally on our servers and none of your data is ever shared with anyone nor read by our staff. More here.
The system has been very effective in blocking abuse, and we saw a significant decrease in the number of backups containing harmful content after its implementation. (based on number of reports and manual reviews)
We are still not sure if the termination was related to the abuse, or owning many bot cloned instances, or something else entirely. We hope we can figure that out soon.
Abuse reports
It is a known fact that any tool will always find its user group that will use it against its purpose. And unfortunately, marCloudBackup was no exception to this rule.
However, we have always been very proactive in fighting abuse, and always resolved all reports we received. We have taken down hundreds of abusive backups.
Automated content scanning has lowered the amount of abuse significantly, but if you still find a server that you think is abusing our service, please report it to us through our support server.
Now what about the users?
The demand has not slowed down. A few days after the termination we were ready with a temporary solution to keep providing the service, to both donating and free-tier users.
My staff team has been greatly supportive and took over my role as my account was disabled.
We posted an article with what happened and how to get the service back.
marCloudBackup has temporarily become a Discord bot hosting service, where users could create their own bot instances, supply the credentials host themselves the bot, for free, but under their own terms for their own use.
It is still possible to get a free managed instance of the bot for yourself, since the official bot is not available yet. Read the guide and message us on our support server, and we will be happy to set it up for you!
The new beginning
Now, some time has passed. But while I look for a way to bring the bot back officially, I'm implementing all promised features, and adding new ones, so that once the bot is back, it will be better than ever! :D
So this documentation is being created, along with the long awaited user dashboard, where it will be possible to do, well, a lot!
Conclusion
marCloudBackup is not going anywhere, other than to the TOP! It taught me some incredibly valuable lessons about a full, very long lifecycle of a product, and the community I met through it is truly amazing.
I am willing to adjust my approaches, features, and functionalities to make it both compliant and useful for the users. All I care about here is you, the community, and am commited to delivering the highest quality product possible!
If you have any questions, suggestions, or just want to chat about the bot, feel free to join our support server and say hi! :D
Thank you for being a part of this!
~ Marcelektro @ marcloud.net
Last updated: May 4th 2026