- Image by sean dreilinger via Flickr
If you ever thought it was important to back-up the pictures and music on your computer’s hard drive, because bad things happen when you catch a virus or perpetuate a worm, then you understand the risk involved in being on-line. I was hacked this spring, and I know from experience man that it takes a long time to get everything back to the way it was before…
So what about your on-line contacts? What if something bad happens to them?
Yea, I’ve got thousands of contacts on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and I realize that it would be a lot of work to reestablish those connections if something were to happen to one of those services or to my accounts. Risk is made up of both probability and impact. There may be a low probability that something happens to one of my accounts, but the impact would be huge.
Enter Backupify
I’ve talked about Rob May a lot on this blog. To say that he has impacted my life over the past few months would be an gross understatement. He’s started a company called Backupify that automagically backs up your on-line accounts on a daily basis in case of catastrophic failure. This is a big deal if you’ve started archiving your photos on Facebook or Flickr, or if you have a ton of contacts on Twitter.
On-Line Devastation
Imagine if you weren’t able to access any one of your accounts containing photos or contact information because the company went bankrupt or someone hacked your account. That would be bad. I would be personally devastated if that happened, and that’s why I have a Backupify account…
Future Services
As great as Backupify is today, I think that it would be even better if it backed up myTPSreport.com saved searches… Just kidding guys. I have mentioned to Rob though that backing up Ning’s would be cool, as I am the proud owner of a Ning community of Project Managers called LouisvillePM.
Improvements
I think that one area Backupify can improve on is letting me do things with my backed up data. Let me look at my Twitter connections in new and exciting ways, or even cross reference Twitter and Facebook accounts to create a mini-social CRM tool of all my backed-up contacts. Basically, I want to be able to do cool things with my data, on top of backing it up.
Disclosure Alert – Backupify is giving away three Amazon Gift Cards, in a random drawing, to individuals who blog about it and list a service that they would like Backupify to backupify. This post is my entry into that contest. You can participate by following the instructions here…
