Librarian in Black Blog – Sarah Houghton-Jan

Have you ever thought about how much data is in your Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Google Docs, and del.icio.us accounts?  Have you ever considered that you are purely at the mercy of one company, and their server farms, to back-up and preserve your data?  Have you ever wondered what to do about it (if anything)?

Answer: Backupify

Formerly called Lifestream Backup, Backupify offers free and for-pay accounts. The service currently backs up your data on Twitter, Photobucket, and Flickr.  Coming soon is back-up for Facebook, del.icio.us, Gmail, Google Docs, Basecamp, WordPress, and Zoho.  Get more details on exactly what is backed up, and how, in the lower left corner of Backupify’s pricing page.

What you get:

For free:  Twitter back-ups only (always free), up to 10MB

For money:  You can get a 15-day free trial, so check it out! They offer 3 different paid accounts that all include all above social accounts, allow for download-to-PC for your files,  and security options.  See more details below:

• Basic ($29/year):  2GB MB limit
• Premium ($39/year): 10GB MB limit
• Max ($109/year): 50 GB MB limit

Obviously, if you have a lot of photos or other multimedia files, you might want to go with the Max account.

So, how does this work for libraries?  I’d also recommend that account for any library wanting to get started backing up its files.  I know at our library, for our relatively new podcasting/vidcasting project, we’re recommending that folks not only upload their video files to blip.tv, but also store a back-up copy on their shared network drives.  If we had back-up, we wouldn’t have to ask people to do that.  Combine that with also not requiring people to store back-ups of all of their Flickr photos, worry about the archive of their Facebook walls, their Twitter feeds, etc., and $109/year seems like a bargain!  Read more on the Backupify FAQ page.

found via: Robin Hastings (webgoddess) Twitter feed