A New Way to Back up Your Cloud-Based Web Services
Backupify provides daily and weekly backups.
One of the problems of using online services such as WordPress blogs, Facebook and Twitter is that you can't easily save the information you accumulate in the cloud. If you have a WordPress blog, you need to run a regular backup that saves your blog content into an .XML file, for example.
Now a new service from Backupify can help. Using Amazon Web Services and cloud-based storage, Backupify provides backup agents to more than a dozen services, including Google Docs, Blogger and Gmail, Zoho, Delicious, Hotmail and Basecamp. Coming soon are backups for YouTube, Tumblr and general RSS feeds. In addition to these services, business accounts will feature backups of CRM applications and online accounting programs.
Setup for the most part is fairly simple: you have to provide your authentication information, which in some cases is stored in an encrypted place by Backupify. Then the service goes to work on a weekly or daily basis to do the backups, moving your data from its original repository to your account on Backupify. You can have the service notify you when a successful backup is complete via e-mail, along with other conditions, too. Also, you can download what is stored in your archives using a Web browser.
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| Figure 1. Backupify notifies users via e-mail when successful backups are complete. |
A couple of caveats: Gmail and Twitter backups are a bit lengthy, because of the volume of information stored on these accounts. (My Twitter account took more than two hours, for example.) The most trouble I had was getting the WordPress plug-in to install and synchronize: if you're using Wordpress.com to host your blog, you obviously can't use this feature because you can't install any of your own plug-ins. Once you add the plug-in to your site, you activate it on the Backupify settings page and then you initialize the backup back on your blog's Plug-in control panel.
Bottom Line
Backupify is no substitute for a good local backup of your Web services data, but it's something nice to have.
Pricing info: The fee is $49-$79 per year for consumer accounts, and business accounts range from $19-$99/month depending on features.
About the Author
David Strom is an industry veteran trade journalist who's been editor in chief at Network Computing, Tom's Hardware and DigitalLanding.com. In addition, he's written two computer books and many articles for IT journals and Web sites.