Between the Lines

Larry Dignan, Sam Diaz, Andrew Nusca
Home / News & Blogs / Between the Lines

Backupify drops paywall; backs up your data from Twitter, Facebook, and Gmail

By Jason Hiner | December 22, 2009, 4:00am PST

Summary

Not everyone trusts the cloud with their private data. That’s what Backupify is betting on. The service backs up Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, and more. The company has dropped its paywall to attract new users. The people who get in now get a free account indefinitely.

Topics

Facebook, Google Gmail, Twitter Inc., Storage, E-mail Providers, Backups, Cloud Computing, Internet, Jason Hiner

Blogger Info

Larry Dignan

Biography

Larry Dignan

Larry Dignan

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic. He was most recently Executive Editor of News and Blogs at ZDNet. Prior to that he was executive news editor at eWeek and news editor at Baseline. He also served as the East Coast news editor and finance editor at CNET News.com. Larry has covered the technology and financial services industry since 1995, publishing articles in WallStreetWeek.com, Inter@ctive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning magazine. He's a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and the University of Delaware.

For daily updates, follow Larry on Twitter.

Sam Diaz

Biography

Sam Diaz

Sam Diaz

Sam Diaz is a senior editor at ZDNet. He has been a technology and business blogger, reporter and editor at the Washington Post, San Jose Mercury News and Fresno Bee for more than 18 years. He's a member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and a graduate of California State University, Fresno.

Andrew Nusca

Biography

Andrew Nusca

Andrew Nusca

Associate Editor

Andrew J. Nusca is an associate editor for ZDNet and SmartPlanet. As a journalist based in New York City, he has written for Popular Mechanics and Men's Vogue and his byline has appeared in New York magazine, The Huffington Post, New York Daily News, Editor & Publisher, New York Press and many others. He also writes The Editorialiste, a media criticism blog.

He is a New York University graduate and former news editor and columnist of the Washington Square News. He is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He has been named "Howard Kurtz, Jr." by film critic John Lichman despite having no relation to him. A native of Philadelphia, he lives in New York with his fiancee and his cat, Spats.

Follow him on Twitter.

Vendor HotSpot
Here to help you with your Document Management Needs

Read the DocuMentor blog now

Learn More »

One of the best parts of keeping your data in the cloud is that you don’t have to worry quite as much about doing your own backups. If your computer crashes or your hard drive dies, you won’t lose all of the messages from your Gmail account or all of the photos you saved to Flickr.

Nevertheless, trusting lots of private data to a third-party provider on the Web still rattles some users and companies, especially when that valuable data is stored in a free service that has no service level agreement (SLA). There have already been horror stories of Gmail accidentally deleting inboxes as well as user accounts getting hacked and the inboxes getting wiped clean.

That’s where Backupify hopes to fill a new niche by offering user backups of online accounts. Here are the services that Backupify can currently back up:

  • Gmail
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Flickr
  • Photobucket
  • Google Docs
  • Zoho
  • Basecamp
  • Wordpress
  • Blogger
  • Hotmail
  • Delicious
  • FriendFeed

Backupify is also in the process of adding YouTube and Linkedin backups, and plans to launch additional services in the future.

The company’s public launch was in June. It went live with a tiered payment system. It allowed you to back up your Twitter account for free to try out the service but then offered various levels of storage for a monthly fee to do other online accounts from their list.

Backupify president Rob May has now announced that Backupify will back up all online accounts for free and with unlimited storage. The offer will be open until January 31, 2010. The move is an attempt to attract at lot more users. May noted that storage is cheap while customer acquisition is very expensive, and so he and the company want to give more users a chance to try out the full service.

In 2010 Backupify will announce its new pricing structure for the masses, which May said will likely move to a “freemium” model, with a free account that handles a basic amount of storage and then tiered pricing if you need more space. However, those who sign up during this trial will get an open-ended free account for getting in early.

“If you sign up during this time period, you get unlimited storage, for free. You get an account that is not a free trial, not free for a limited time, free forever,” stated May.

Backupify currently has about 3000 subscribers and is adding about 400 users per week. Opening up the entire service for free will likely stimulate user growth and May says that he and his 11-member team are prepared to handle it since the company relies on Amazon’s scalable AWS and S3 services as its backend platform.

May said Twitter is the most popular service that it backs up, followed by Gmail, and then Flickr. Backupify will be showing off all of the services that it can backup at CES 2010 in Las Vegas on January 7-10, when the company will be exhibiting in the Intel booth as part of Intel’s launch of a new app store for netbooks. Backupify will be one of the featured apps.

One of the coolest features that Backupify offers is the ability to export your entire Twitter account (status updates, mentions, direct messages, and more) to a PDF. This is especially useful since Twitter doesn’t have an archive feature that allows you to go back and look at your old data.

One drawback to Backupify is that it cannot do an automatic restore. It simply gives you a private copy of your data. That leads me to the other drawback. Since Backupify is grabbing your data through APIs and HTML scraping, your backup files are all in XML format (except for the Twitter PDF), which can be a little intimidating to sort through for some users.

That said, there is definitely a peace of mind involved in having a copy of your valuable Web data and storing it in an online vault that you can control. This is an idea with very good timing and so far the execution looks pretty good in my tests with Twitter, Gmail, Facebook, and Flickr.

As May put it, “It’s about data liberation. My data is everywhere. I just want to be able to control it.”

Kick off your day with ZDNet's daily e-mail newsletter. It's the freshest tech news and opinion, served hot. Get it.

Jason Hiner is the Editor in Chief of TechRepublic. He writes about mobile computing, emerging technologies, and enterprise IT.

Disclosure

Jason Hiner

Jason Hiner has nothing to disclose. He doesn't hold investments in the technology companies he covers.

Biography

Jason Hiner

Jason Hiner is the Editor in Chief of TechRepublic, an online trade publication and peer-to-peer community for IT leaders. He writes about mobile computing, emerging technologies, and enterprise IT, examining the hot trends and asking the big questions. He previously worked as an IT manager in the health care industry.

You can also find Jason on Twitter, LinkedIn and at JasonHiner.com.

More from “Between the Lines”

Related Discussions on TechRepublic

Did you know you can take part in these discussions with your ZDNet membership?
Ask a Question Start a Discussion

Talkback Most Recent of 3 Talkback(s)

Talkback - Tell Us What You Think

advertisement

The best of ZDNet, delivered

ZDNet Newsletters

Get the best of ZDNet delivered straight to your inbox

Facebook Activity

Blog Roll

Blog Archive

White Papers, Webcasts, & Resources
advertisement
Click Here