backup Archive

Have you ever wondered what you had for lunch 19 days ago? What about how many times you “released some gas” on November 12, 2008? What about how many times your followers said the phrase “Justin Bieber” the day after the Grammy Awards? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, I have found a service that can help!

In all seriousness, there is always a good reason to backup your contributed content on all social services. Last night at the Austin Co-Founders Wanted meetup, BackupMyTweets (BMT) co-founder Joshua Baer provided an overview of how his Twitter backup service works. The basic concept is simple…you enter your Twitter username and BackupMyTweets will create a backup of all of your posted messages on Twitter from the day you created your account. Apparently Twitter will only display the last 3,200 messages you have posted.

The service is free to use if (I believe) you allow BMT to send out a message into your Twitter stream letting your followers know you are using BMT. You can pay $5/year to grab the BMT premium edition which doesn’t send out the auto-message and it also will backup all of your followers tweets too so you can create a timeline back to the day you created your Twitter account.

Over 20,000 people have signed up for the service so far and there are paying customers as well. Joshua is looking for someone to run the business. He said that with someone working on the management full-time, he expects they could increase their userbase 10x without much work. If you are interested in this position, you can contact Joshua on Twitter.
Continue reading “Co-Founder Wanted: BackupMyTweets Offers Twitter Backup Service (video)” »

All of the presenters at the Future of Web Apps summit who run web apps talked about hosting and then discussed the importance of a good backup system. In my interview with Ted from Dogster following the event, he mentioned how his first backup app didn't run correctly and he lost a bit of data.

So this morning I get up, hit the power button and get a message that says "NTLDR not found" — lovely right? There goes all my data. Luckily it seems the bios changed the boot order and when I switched the hard drives boot order, the machine booted again. Then I get an email from a friend that his hard drive crashed last night and is reinstalling Windows from scratch. What fun that is, not to mention what data might be lost. So I immediately did a backup of everything on my hard drives to my external drives. So if this pc dies, I have everything backed up.

So then I thought about CenterNetworks and my other sites. Is the backup working correctly I wondered? So I checked and yes, the nightly backups are working as intended and everything looks good. So your comments, posts, etc. are all safe in multiple locations. I can't share the locations because I would have to silence each of you!

And then I see this post from Bridget at Toggl about how Toggl manages your data including backup and protection.

A note from the post:

Because you are trusting our application to hold your valuable meeting and time tracking information, the security of that data is incredibly important.

I think it is great for a growing company to say: Hey this is how we protect and backup your data. This is how we ensure your data is not going to be lost in the event of a hardware failure.

So I issue a challenge to the other web apps out there that collect and store user's data: Share some details about how you backup and protect our data.