January 30, 2010 | Digital Security

These days many people prefer to have their applications in the cloud, instead of hosting them by themselves.

For example, people who use Gmail prefer accessing e-mail through a web browser instead of downloading their e-mail and viewing it with an e-mail program.

But what happens if Google loses your e-mail? The answer, for some, might be Backupify, a new cloud backup service.

Coincidentally, today is the last day they are offering free accounts, and today is the day I found out about it. So before you read the rest of this article, go and sign up for an account here: https://secure.backupify.com/signup

Note: Although it asks for your personal details (including address and phone number), all you have to enter is your name and e-mail address to get signed up.

Why you need to back up your social media accounts

How much did you pay for your Gmail account? For your Twitter account? Facebook? $0?

Well, how much liability do you think they have if they lose your e-mail, your tweets, your updates? Right, zero dollars.

While it’s true that these services have all kinds of great servers hosting your data, it’s also true that problems do occur. If you get a lot of advantage from your social networking presence, you’ll likely not want to take the risk of losing all of your hard work.

Cloud services that Backupify backs up

Backupify backs up:

• Flickr
• Twitter
• Delicious
• Zoho
• Google Docs
• Photobucket
• Wordpress
• Services in Beta
• Basecamp
• Gmail
• Facebook
• FriendFeed
• Blogger
• Hotmail

It will back up the following cloud services later:

• Youtube
• Xmarks
• RssFeed
• Tumblr

After you sign up, you’re sent to the Settings screen:

Just click on a Manage for a given service to back up your account on that service.

Backing up Twitter

For example, to back up your Twitter account, click on Manage for Twitter, and then provide your account credentials:

Backupify goes out to Twitter, downloads your tweets, and backs them up.

You can choose to back up daily or weekly.

Backing up WordPress

Backupify can back up your WordPress blog, too. To do this, you first have to install a WordPress plugin.

How Backupify works

Backupify uses account information that you give to access your accounts. For some kinds of services, it doesn’t send a username/password over the wire, but rather depends on something called a token to avoid having to exchange authentication information.

To the extent possible, Backupify keeps your data in encrypted format. It’s true that you have to trust them to a certain extent. If you don’t trust them, don’t give them any of your user account info.

It’s worth mentioning that, according to Alexa, Backupify is about the 15000th most popular website in the United States, so it’s not just a fly-by-night operation.

My comments

Although I haven’t decided to what extent I want Backupify to back up my social media accounts, I’ve gone ahead and signed up for the free account, which, again, they say the last day for is January 31.

Thanks to Bob Buskirk, whose article on Backupify I just caught today.

Resources

Backupify

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2 Responses to “Back Up Gmail, Facebook, WordPress, and Other Social Media with Backupify”

1. Backupify Social Media Backup Free Account Offer Extended | Digitivity says:

   February 5, 2010 at 9:14 am

   [...] wrote the other day about social media backup with a new service called [...]
2. Keith Ellertson says:

   March 13, 2010 at 12:23 pm

   Oh that’s all I need… You can practically live on facebook. Funny thing is I said I would never do facebook! Now I’m there daily.

   Keith Ellertson
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