Keep Your Online Life Safe With Backupify

Post by David Pierce. Find me on Twitter.

It’s staggering how much information I now have online, in a place that I can’t control or own. Facebook has become my default photo album; Twitter’s where a lot of communication happens; Gmail’s where everything piece of important information in my life currently resides. And I don’t think I’m alone in that.

Most of the time, that’s not a problem. But what if Twitter suddenly shuts down? Or Facebook decides to take its ball and go home? Or, perhaps more likely, what if Google closes your account after it’s been hacked or misused (which has happened more than once)? Then, frankly, we’d be screwed. But not if you have Backupify. Backupify is a brand-new tool that is incredibly hard to type for some reason, but is also incredibly useful.

Backupify backs up everything you have in the cloud for you, automatically and easily. It already supports Gmail, Twitter, Google Docs, Flickr, Facebook, Basecamp, Wordpress, Delicious, Photobucket, Blogger and FriendFeed, and more services are promised soon.

Give Backupify your login information for all these services (a big red flag, I know, but all indications are that it’s safe), and that’s it! Every so often, you’ll get an email letting you know everything is backed up safe and sound. If, for some reason, one of these sites goes down or your account gets lost, your data is safe and sound.

Backupify’s backup is, by default, also to the cloud. A little ironic, maybe, but it makes sense—it’s a redundancy move, trying to keep all your data in too many places for it all to go away. You can, though, download your data to your computer and keep it yourself, just in case all hell really breaks loose.

For right now, there’s not a lot you can do with your data, as it’s in the mostly-unreadable formats the applications themselves use. But, let’s say you suddenly need your Gmail data – you can get it out, and solutions are coming from Backupify to make your data more accessible.

This is the kind of application you hope you forget having, because you never need it. But take the ten minutes to go set it up – on the off chance you do need it, you’ll be more than glad you did. As someone who’s paranoid enough to download a copy of my email to my hard drive once a week, knowing Backupify’s got it covered is excellent for my blood pressure.

If you get an account before Jan 31, Backupify is completely free. After that, it probably won’t be. So go get it now!

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