Backup online accounts with Backupify

Backupify.com is a backup service with a twist. It can help you back up a long list of online accounts, including Twitter, Gmail, Picasa, Facebook, Google Docs, Delicious, WordPress and more. Backups goes straight into Backupify’s system so you don’t have to download anything to your computer, a blessing in the Middle East where at least our home Internet connections can be slow and unreliable.

Backing up data is of course important but not of much use unless you can restore that data if something happens. This is a vital component of any backup strategy and one that too many users ignore.

How to restore some of this data that Backupify has copied if something happens is at present a bit uncertain. In the FAQ you can read:

How do I restore my data if I lose it?

It depends on the account. For something like Flickr, we can restore your account to a state very similar to what it was before you lost it. This isn’t yet automated, so our programmers will have to do it manually for you. For something like Twitter, we can’t time stamp a tweet so we can never really restore you account. The best we can do is re-tweet everything for you at one time, but your followers would probably hate that. If you have specific questions about specific services, email us and we can answer them for you.

I’ve only had a Backupify account for about a week now so I can’t really share any experience from it, especially in terms of restoring data. However, I do think it’s a very good idea to back up online accounts to another account online thereby saving time. Just my GMail account alone holds about 8GB of data. I can’t even imaging downloading that to my computer at home in Dubai on a regular basis.