Are the newest Stack Overflow data dumps still usable today?

Question

The network connection hasn't worked for some weeks in my place, so I'd want something like hosting a Stack Overflow Dump offline before the Internet connection stops working.

I don't think I'll have time to code something, so I've tried this, which works fast on importing smaller Stack Exchange websites.

But that's not the case for SO, wherefore it gets to be overkill (it needs too much time and too many resources) since it has too many posts, comments, and other.

My questions are:

1. For which user use does Stack Overflow get data-dumped if it's almost unmanageable?
2. Is there a solution/alternative to what I want today?

Answer 1

1. Universities spring to mind as they like to tap into that huge set for all kind of purposes. Quality of texts, interactions, social effects, artificial intelligence, you name it.

   Those kind of use cases don't mind the size. The more data they have, the more reliable their models can get. And they have all the time. Mind you that the Stack Overflow dump is already split in several files (Posts, Comments, Posthistory, and Votes) so you don't have to load all data if you're only interested in Comments.

2. What you can do is create a couple of SEDE queries to get you just the data you need that is of your interest. You can for example only download the posts from the Haskell tag in the CSV format and import that into your data-store of choice. Keep in mind that your dataset can be at most 50,000 rows so you might need some trickery/filtering in a few steps if your need more data. Additional benefit is that the SEDE database is refreshed weekly so you get more recent stuff as opposed to the data-dump that is still on a quarterly refresh scheme.