We’ve talked before about the importance of having recent backups of all your data. But some recent data-loss incidents, along with some other related news, made me think it’s worth talking about again.
Recent data-loss events that caught my attention include (1) Twitter losing about 3,000 of my tweets, and (2) Alex King losing Crowd Favorites data when his server hard drive failed.
As for my tweets, Twitter Tech Support hunted around a couple of days, found them, and restored them. I then backed up all of my tweets to an HTML file using BackupMyTweets. [I learned about them from a tweet by @TimOreilly.] They also have a service for backing up Gmail, Hotmail, or Windows Live accounts, WordPress, Blogger, or TypePad blogs, and Online Photos. I have not tried any of their services except the Twitter backup. Interestingly, I have used that backup a couple of times recently to search for specific information I had tweeted about: it is easy to search an HTML file, and since the complete history is there, I can search farther back than other Twitter search tools can. (They typically just go back a couple of weeks.)
There are other services for backing up Twitter, Gmail, etc. For example, Mashable recently discussed the use of LifeStreamBackup for backup services. And, Lifehacker recently listed several free tools for backing up various online data.
Google’s new Data Liberation Front also describes how to backup Google Apps data, and emphasizes that your Google Apps data belongs to you. Twitter also recently emphasized that your tweets belong to you:
Ownership—Twitter is allowed to “use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute” your tweets because that’s what we do. However, they are your tweets and they belong to you.
There are probably backup services other than the ones I have mentioned. If there aren’t already a dozen such services, no doubt there will be, as so many of the start-ups these days just seem to copy each others’ models. Since I don’t know all the services, I do not know which is the best. But, I do know that my own preference is to go with a service that lets me backup the data in a format that I can download to my machine, so I have possession of it in case the service goes bankrupt.
Anyway, I hope this reminder will help you (and me) do good with data backups.
If you have additional tips on this, please share them with all of us via the comments.