Backing up data in a proper way is not easy at all. A few months ago I reviewed the Clickfree Portable Backup Drive. That backup drive is good to backup all sorts of data stored on your computer or on your laptop. But what about YOUR data which is stored online.

Imagine you would lose data from one or more of these online services. Flick, Twitter, Gmail, Google Docs, Facebook, Delicious, Hotmail. Personally for me that would be a true disaster. I’ve got all my pictures in my Flickr Account (well over 10.000 photo’s), all my e-mails in Gmail and Hotmail and I’ve got several other valuable data on my Twitter and Facebook account. If one of these services would go down that would be a little bit of a personal disaster. Backupify can be a solution to prevent loosing this data.

Services and Settings

Backupify is a service which brings data-backup of a lot of services on the internet. Currently the supported services are: Flick, Twitter, Delicious, Zoho, Google Docs, Photobucket, and WordPress.
There are a few services in beta these are: Basecamp, Gmail, Facebook, FriendFeed, Blogger and Hotmail.
Other services which should be available soon are: Youtube, Xmarks, RssFeed and Tumblr.

In the settings you can add your settings to the different services. It is possible to add more than one account of a service. In the example below I added two Twitter accounts to the backup service.

The process of adding a service is different for each service. For instance adding a Twitter account can be done by logging in and granting backupify to access your twitter account with a token. But in order to perform a backup for your Gmail account you need to keep you gmail password stored within you backupify account.

An other option in the settings is to choose how often a backup should be automatically performed. You can choose to do a daily or a weekly backup and you can choose when you would like to be informed about the backup status:

Backupify uses Amazon S3 service (http://aws.amazon.com/s3/) to store the backupped files. The backupped files can’t be downloaded all at one to your PC or Laptop, Single files need to be downloaded from the Archives in Backupify

Final Thoughts

First of all I would like to give a question in de FAQ-section on the Backupify website a little bit more attention.

How do I know what was backed up?

Initial backups usually take 24 – 48 hours, depending on how much data you have in your accounts. Once you sign up, you can access all your data from the “archives” page simply by choosing a service from the drop down menu. We also give you the option of receiving daily or weekly digests of which services were backed up

I registered about 24 hours ago and untill now no item can be found in the archives page. According to the FAQ above this is completely normal. I will update this page as soon as I see an item in my Archives page.

But what’s more important to know is that for users who register an account at Backupify until Jan 31st 2010, their account will be a free subscription. New users after Jan 31st 2010 will have to pay for the Backupify service. So go over there and grab yourself a Backupify account while it’s still free.

UPDATE

Jan 8th 2009: My (large) Flickr account is now available in the Backupify Archives – It looks like ALL my pictures are backupped correctly -. I’m very impressed!