Backupify Cloud Backup

There's a new service around called Backupify. It's an online backup system for your online identities/services (free usage till January 31, 2010). It provides automated online backup for the following online services:

• Gmail
• Twitter
• Google Docs
• Flickr
• Facebook
• Basecamp
• Wordpress
• Delicious
• Photobucket
• Blogger
• FriendFeed
• More coming soon...

On itself a nice service, since cloud services aren't invulnerable to customer data lose. This way you have a online backup in case Flickr or Twitter 'decides' to purge your data.

There are some 'drawbacks' though (in my opinion).....

Cloud Security

When someone hacks your Flickr, Twitter, or Wordpress blog account, you lose the data on that specific service. When your Backupify account gets hacked, you could lose your entire online social life (this one is quicker though).
NOTE: I do assume that you don't use the same username and password (scheme) with every online service.

Restoration Process

The following part was taken from their FAQ page:

How do I restore my data if I lose it?

It depends on the account. For something like Flickr, we can restore your account to a state very similar to what it was before you lost it. This isn't yet automated, so our programmers will have to do it manually for you. For something like Twitter, we can't time stamp a tweet so we can never really restore you account. The best we can do is re-tweet everything for you at one time, but your followers would probably hate that. If you have specific questions about specific services, email us and we can answer them for you.

First Flickr; Imagine a Pro account with hundreds/thousands of photo's. All these photos belong to hundreds of groups. Most of these groups have limitations on how many photos you can add. Restoring that could take years.

Since commenting on Flickr is user specific, you're going to loose all data on the comments as well (remove a photo, remove all the comments associated with it). So all you end up with after a restore, is your images and maybe your tags, since the are no longer embedded in the actual image after you upload to Flickr.
So, this is only a good thing if you use Flickr as your offsite backup, and not as part of your social online identity. There's no way they can restore that.

Next Twitter; they mentioned it already in their FAQ. Why would you want to restore (re-tweet) thousands of tweets in one time? Spam anyone??? I will definitely kick that person from my list, and this be the same with many others, I imagine.
So a Twitter restore could also end up in a kind of social suicide.

I did send them an e-mail regarding some other questions I had. I'll post the results as soon as I get the answers.

Update on Monday, January 11, 2010 at 16:32 by Willem

It's been almost a week since I asked them to shed some light on certain backup and restore questions. Especially username and password related but also why some things need to be done manually. Who is doing this? (probably some cheap 'techies' in India). What rules are in place regarding my privacy? etc.
I've heard nothing from them, and that only supports my suspicion that this can't (and probably won't) work. They can't answer an simple e-mail, how can they restore my backup when I ask them?

Their excuse is probably that the service appeared to be more popular then anticipated, and that they couldn't handle the load. Since the website runs smoothly, and the sign-up process is completely automatic, it can only be that they are on holiday. It can't be that they are busy restoring stuff, because I haven't heard of any cloud-service-failure this past week.