Many of us are now depending on online services to store images, documents, thoughts, and memories. A service has surfaced called Backupify that backs up all of this data. Backupify is an online service that backs up data on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google Docs to Amazon’s S3 backup service.
When I first heard of Backupify I was intrigued but wondered why. The whole selling point of online services is that we do not need to worry about our local hard drives and backup routines, etc. What are the chances of an online provider such as Google just disappearing or losing our data? Well there is a point I had not considered. What if your online provider cuts you off. It can happen and it has happened to a few users. Read your Terms of Service. There is probably language in there to prevent you from doing things that are on the wrong side of the law. Whether that includes copyright infringement or defamation or any other nefarious activity. Your provider can cut off your access just based on a complaint. They would rather just anger you then fight a legal case.
The sign-up for Backupify is very straight forward. You use your email as your user name and create a password. They ask if you would like the free version or bring your own Amazon S3 account. Right now the service is free for new users who sign up before January 31, 2010. Once you have signed up you just add your services such as Google Docs or Facebook via your login information for those products. Some products such as Zoho require an API key as well.
I do have a couple of questions about Backupify. How are they going to make money down the road? Will they charge for restoration or access to data? Even if I choose to save the data in my Amazon S3 account is the data accessible via another portal into S3 such as Jungle Disk?