That was my first thought too but imagine you have to do a factory reset. To use dd to restore your device, you will have to enable Developer mode. How?
Can't one wireshark/mitm the connection (even with n900) and dump all the data that comes in to reproduce it once the servers die? Unless the data is modified for each and every credential, but having single credential reencoding still should be possible (with sailors still around for the meetings, hopefully some way to backup the latest, even if a bit dodgy from legal pov, should be doable)
I assume if you have your device, dd backup of everything.