Backup Your Facebook, Twitter and Blog with Backupify

Are there some things that you have uploaded to a social medium that you don’t have stored anywhere else? Perhaps you are implicitly relying on Facebook and Twitter remaining operational so that all those funny comments, memorable photos, shared links and event calendars are not lost?

If you have been following this blog for a while, you would know how passionate I am about backing up precious data and how much I encourage others to do likewise. So if you’re feeling responsible or maybe a bit guilty or concerned that you haven’t done anything just yet, here’s your chance!

There’s a great service called Backupify which can backup your content located on stack of services, including (but not limited to):

• Blogger*,
• Delicious,
• Facebook*,
• Flickr,
• FriendFeed*,
• Gmail*,
• Google Calendar*,
• Google Contacts*,
• Google Docs,
• Hotmail*,
• Photobucket
• Picasa Web Albums*,
• Twitter,
• WordPress*.

* Backup for these services is currently in beta.

If you want to give it a shot, there is a free plan that includes 2GB of space but there are Premium and Business plans that offer 10GB and 25GB respectively for US$39.95 and US$59.95 each. There are differing capabilities between the plans such as the number of accounts per service you can backup, priority support or archive frequency. If you want to check out those details, click here.

The real question is what to do with the backups. The average punter wouldn’t know what to do with the SQL and XML files that embody the text portion of the backups. Granted, the XML files are quite readable (albeit as a plain text file unless your browser provides some collapsing hierarchy magic). The SQL files on the other hand are a no go zone unless you can actually read it. Even then, the SQL files are of limited use unless you are going to restore the data into your own database and are willing to change the syntax to suit.

That aside, Backupify is great for backing up all of those photos you upload straight from your phone. I don’t know about you but I have found it painful downloading each photo one by one from my albums. I’ve  wiped my phone before realising that I haven’t copied off all of the photos so going back to Facebook or Twitter has been my only recourse. Best of all, Backupify will do its stuff in the background without you having to do anything other that the initial setup.

At the end of the day, Backupify might give you that added peace of mind for the right price (free!).