Back up Gmail/Facebook/Flickr

Gmail’s outage today made me think about something I’ve had in the back of my brain for a while.  While I’m a big fan of the cloud (as long as it makes sense for you), one of the things we say is that you can outsource the management of your data, but not the responsibility for it.  I’ve also written that for personal data, I do not believe in using a free (or incredibly cheap) cloud service provider to store your only copy of data. For example, I don’t believe that the only copy of your pictures should be on Flickr.

But now there’s a way to have two copies of data in the cloud: cloud backups for cloud storage.  Backupify.com and backupmyblog.com/backupmypics.com/backupmytweets.com/backupmymail.com will back up various parts of your online life for a reasonable fee.

Backupify.com has a free plan that will back up 2 GB of online data from Facebook, Twitter, Gmail and more.  The Pro account includes support for Google Apps and handles up to 20 GB of online data from 25 online accounts for $4.99/month.  Finally, they have the Pro 500 account that handles an unlimited number of accounts with an unlimited amount of storage for $19.95/mth.

Backupmyblog.com/backupmypics.com/backupmytweets.com/backupmymymail.com has a free 1 GB account and a basic account that cost $19.95/year for up to 1 GB of online data.  Additional storage is $2.95/GB/yr.  It is unclear if someone who wanted to back up all of those things would need four accounts or one account.

I have not used either of these (yet), but I’m surely thinking about it.


Written by W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston), four-time O'Reilly author, and host of The Backup Wrap-up podcast. I am now the Technology Evangelist at Sullivan Strickler, which helps companies manage their legacy data

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