Backupify…
Recently, I’ve been thinking about my Gmail account: I have nearly 15,ooo emails spanning nearly 6 years. If anything were to happen to my account – it gets hacked, Google deletes it on accident, or you get locked out by forgetting your password – I would not have any back up of all those messages. Additionally, if I ever wanted to use a different mail service, I would definitely want to take all those messages to my new account.
Backupify is a service that not only backs up Gmail, but will also back up your Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and a number of other services, protecting your online data.
If you think you might like to have your online data set up for a recurring back ups using Backupify for $50, please contact me by going to the About The Digitante page and fill out the contact form or give me a call anytime. If you prefer to do it yourself, read on.
Signing up for Backupify is simple. Just enter your name, email address, choose a password, and select the Free account for now. You can back up 1Gb of stuff with the Free account. We’ll discuss the paid version of Backupify in a bit.
You are immediately deposited on the Settings page. Before you continue, go to your email account and be sure to click the link in the confirmation email. Actually backing up your accounts fairly simple. I’ll go through an example with Twitter.
- Be sure you are logged into the Twitter account that you want to back up.
- Click on the Manage link to the right of the Twitter icon.
- There are two check boxes and a text box. You have the option to tweet that you are protecting your account with Backupify (I did that just for fun). You can customize the message to say whatever you like. I added a note that this post would be up in the morning.
- You can choose to follow Backupify on Twitter to get updates when new services are added and other good information.
- Once you are squared away on those two items, click the Twitter Authentication link.
- In order to finish the process, you must allow Backupify to have access to your Twitter data. I do want to clarify that Backupify will NOT have access to your Twitter password and can be denied access to your account at any time by going to the Connections page in the Settings for your Twitter account. (On an aside: Gmail does require you to enter your password, but it is encrypted, so just be aware of that).
After being redirected to the Twitter setup page, you will see your Twitter account listed at the top. Need to add another Twitter account? Repeat the above steps, but sign into Twitter with another account.
You can repeat a similar process or each service you want to back up. There are some nuances depending on what you are backing up: Facebook allows you to choose what information you back up – pictures, wall posts, profile, etc.
Size limits
As I mentioned earlier, the Free account allows you to back up a total of 1Gb of data. My Gmail account alone has well over 2Gb of emails in it, so I can’t back it up via Backupify directly. Instead, I am required to open an Amazon S3 account. Amazon S3 is online storage space that you pay a monthly fee for. For most people the cost is going to be $0.15 per Gb per month.
You may wonder why someone would pay a fee to back up things like Twitter and Facebook, and for most individuals you would be correct in wondering. However, the reason I decided to write this post was because a local restaurant owner named Scott (of Scotty’s Brewhouse) uses Twitter and Facebook extensively to market his business to his customers (about 4,000 of them actually).
As such, it would very bad if something happened at Facebook and he ended up losing all those connections, so for him, it may make sense to spend the extra couple of dollars.
In the end, I ended up going with another method to back up my Gmail but in the future it will be something I write about here.
Before I wrap things up, I need to make a little complaint: I cannot for the life of me figure out how much space my back ups I’ve created thus far are taking up. It seems like there would be a dashboard front and center telling you how much space you are using. Secondly, I wish it would at least give me an approximation of how much space my next back up is going to be consuming. It says my back ups may not complete for 24-48 hours, so if something pops up later, I’ll be sure to post a follow up.
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Blogged.com
Thanks for the review! Just for clarification, you can actually backup more than 1Gb. We don’t limit accounts right now, and are launching paid premium accounts soon.
Rob
Thanks for letting me know, Rob. And thanks for checking out the article.