Cloud Gazing: Backupify

One of the biggest fears about moving to the cloud is how do you backup your data. The data sits on someone else’s server and usually there is no easy way for you to backup that data. You are at the mercy of the service provider to backup your data and if they go under, cancel your account or just don’t have a backup strategy you could be out of luck That’s where Backupify comes in.  Backupify is a service that allows you to backup your different cloud based services. You can backup the data to your own Amazon S3 account, or just use Backupify’s account. This is great for people who want to make sure that there important files are in more then one place.

Setup is simple, after creating your account you are given a list of service they support. You select the service you want to back up, enter your credentials and away it goes. Where ever possible it uses Oath to authenticate so that you don’t have to trust backupify with your password. Though there are some services that don’t support this.  Once the service is registered it will backup, usually in the next 24 hours.

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They haven’t announced costs yet, but they are committed to a Freemium model. There will a free account with limited storage and a Premium account with more features and storage that you pay for. What the exact differences will be they haven’t announced. What they have announced is that if you sign up before January 31 2010 you will get unlimited storage. This wont be true for the free accounts if you sign up after January 31.

For me it’s the unlimited storage that is most attractive, since I’m using it to backup our family flickr account. It’s nice to get 2 backups for t It’s nice to know that all the photos on my flickr are on a second server in the cloud. I’m also using it for my blog, facebook, Gmail, Google Docs and more.

The data is stored in XML and they have a simple Archive interface for retrieving the data. They are working on automated restores for the different services. Though for some services like Twitter there wouldn’t really be a way to restore your past tweet since the twitter API doesn’t support dated tweets. They are as well as zip based downloads.

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My only complaints with the service aren’t really complaints. I wish they supported more sites. IMAP based email backup would be nice, plus the ability to set the backup schedule independently for each service.  I’m currently set for daily backups which is great for most sites but for my blog it’s increased my traffic by a few hundred meg a day. That shouldn’t be a problem for my hosting account now, but it might be as my blog grows. So it would be nice if I could limit that to once a week while keeping all my other services as daily.

I would recommend that all my readers who are using any cloud base services to sign up before the end of the month.

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