Backupify
by Mike on Dec.26, 2009, under Technology
I came across Backupify on some podcast or other. Their concept is fantastic – we all trust much of our data to the cloud now and Backupify backs up cloud data. Backupify is free until the end of January which also helps. The supported services have must people covered, I have started to use it for backing up WordPress, Twitter and Google Docs but it does other things.
Setup is dead easy and once you have authorised your accounts you just sit back and it does the hard work with daily or weekly backups. When I first signed up I had a couple of issues: the Google Docs backups just contained a line saying not authorised and my Twitter account had been ignored. I deleted the Google Docs accounts and re-added, I also got a reply on Twitter from Backupify so I am not sure whether they fixed it or I did – either way it works now. The only slight issue I have is that my WordPress has not backed up more than once, this may well be because it hasn’t changed but positive confirmation would be nice.
I have no affiliation with Backupify other than being a user of it and thinking it is a very cool concept that deserves to succeed. They also answered a tweet on Christmas day which makes them as sad as me!
December 26th, 2009 on 7:24 pm
Maybe I spoke too soon. Twitter, Facebook and WordPress ignored by the latest backup. Google Docs does seem to be working though.
December 27th, 2009 on 5:38 pm
Hi Mike,
Thanks for the review! Your backups run once a day for each service, and they don’t all run at the same time. The way it works is that each backup is set to the time you originally setup the account. So if you set up Twitter backup at noon and WordPress backup at 2pm, your twitter backup will be queued up at noon every day and your WordPress backup will be queued up at 2pm every day. Notice I said “queued”, not “backed up”. It could be backed up in 5 minutes, or it could be a few hours once it is queued up. It depends on how many services are in the queue, and how the backups are running. Some days, when APIs of some services are slow or not responding, the queues run longer. In general, when the queue for a service grows beyond 8 hours, we add servers to speed up the queue. We are working on more advanced algorithms to back stuff up faster, but the challenge is that we don’t know how many pictures you have posted to Flickr since last backup, until it’s your turn for backup and we ask Flickr. So the trouble arises when we see 5 Flickr accounts in the queue, and think “ok, that shouldn’t take too long” but then one of the accounts has uploaded 1000 new photos, and it takes a few hours. We can’t currently anticipate that. Hence the challenge in doing backups at the same time every day.
Please note two things also. First, if you don’t change any content, we don’t do a new backup. So if you don’t write a new blog post for a month, your most recent backup will be from a month ago. Second, if you post something just a couple of minutes after your backup for that service was completed, it could take another day or more (depending on queue length) before it gets backed up.