Anyone who has ever crashed a computer without a backup knows the painful and arduous process required to restore the machine to its previous state. As such, many of us keep regular backups of the data on our systems, just in case.
But there’s another vast set of data many of us are creating on a daily basis that has little to no backup at all - beyond the services that host that content: our lifestreams. Now, a new service - named appropriately enough, LifestreamBackup - aims to provide the peace of mind that your lifestream data will always be just as accessible as the backup of your machine.
Is losing this data really a problem? If it’s not now, it soon will be.
The most obvious example of this loss of access to lifestream data? The inability to access anything beyond beyond page 162 on Twitter. No matter how many times you’ve posted, you cannot go back any further than 3240 tweets. So, every new public message you send removes one from your history. (To see this in action, simply add “?page=162″ to the end of any Twitter user’s default URL.) Those who had seen Twitter as a journal of sorts for recording fleeting moments for posterity, suddenly found those moments just as fleeting online.
That’s just one example. There are thousands of others: blogs crashing, videos being taken down, companies shutting down services. The list goes on and on.
The point being: saving the content you are producing elsewhere so that you always have access to it is going to become a bigger and bigger problem as time goes on - especially as more and more people move into the social Web. For that reason, LifestreamBackup seems to be ahead of the game with this proposed offering.
While not yet available, LifestreamBackup proposes to launch in the coming weeks. For a small fee, the service will take your various feeds and back them up on Amazon S3 - either your account or theirs. Current pricing is set at $6.95 per month for 10G of data.
“We will launch with the ability to backup Flickr and a blog (via RSS feed). Google Docs, Twitter feeds, Youtube and Facebook backup are all in the works and will come shortly after launch. If it has an API that allows us to pull data, we are happy to back it up for you.”
The cloud provides a cost-effective resource for storage. Still, one has to wonder, given the concerns with availability, is saving to the cloud the best place to back things up? The cloud for all its benefits is not a perfect place. Apparently, the more cautious among us will still be pulling a backup of that backup - which we’ll house offsite somewhere.
For more, Lifestream Blog points us to a video from “Somewhat Frank” Gruber where a number of people - for the first few minutes - chat about the pros and cons of the concept.
Suffice it to say, it’s a start. And, a step in the right direction. LifestreamBackup isn’t likely to take the market by storm. But it’s important to consider it, nonetheless, because it’s definitely addressing a growing need.
We’re still very early in this version of the Web. There’s no doubt that saving the things that are important to us - our social interactions and our historical references - for future reference will become a very important business indeed.
(Image “Lifestream-Seaform” courtesy jemsweb. Used under Creative Commons.)
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Definitely a smart idea in the wake of the economy and rate many companies have shutdown or shutdown services (AOL, GooG, etc).
The part I think is beneficial and I wish other companies would follow is allowing me to back up to my own Amazon S3 storage area. This assures me that I have control of that and likewise if needed I can always copy down my bucket locally to backup. I hate when companies lock you into their own S3 slice, these folks are doing that right way by offering two options.
Posted by: Rob Mowery | January 16, 2009 1:35 AM
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Basically, it is still backing-up on the cloud, just combining various stream to just one single cloud (S3).
What if you want to back-up your lifestream by downloading them to your own HDD? I guess it is still quite impossible to do so without going through lots of pain.
What if one day you are inaccessible to internet, but need those information?
Posted by: Ryan | January 16, 2009 1:37 AM
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You cannot get a complete and thus accurate backup of a blog simply using an RSS feed. It’s just not possible because lots of important data are not present in the feed.
One example —- comments are not in the feed for the vast majority of platforms. Wordpress has a comments feed, but even that data is not complete. Blogger doesn’t even display a date for comments.
I looked at data portability for these types of applications extensively. Certain revelations during this process actually led to my last startup. I can tell you with certainty that a complete backup is not possible without a “Wordpress Agent” much like an “Exchange Agent.”
Posted by: Raj | January 16, 2009 5:09 AM
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If you want a free, but text only, backup. Check out http://storytlr.com, it enable you to download your data in CSV files (like you complete twitter history). Quite handy !
Posted by: eschnou | January 16, 2009 5:25 AM
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Do we *really* need to keep everything? I’d be hard-pressed to think of a single Tweet worthy of retention. What I’d like to see is a cloud archive, where you can select material from your own docs or those of others, which you can then stash away and search at need.
Posted by: Wendy Reynolds | January 16, 2009 6:37 AM
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Backup is interesting, not anything I’d pay for, but interesting.
Where is the ability to restore it though?
This is only half a solution because I can “backup” any RSS feed with my desktop feed reader, and taking backups of your blog installation is pretty simple (not sure about hosted).
The lack of any mention about what can be done with the backed-up data is mind boggling.
Posted by: coldbrew | January 16, 2009 7:47 AM
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Really great idea for the protection of the data on our blogs.
I will try to do this ASAP.Thanks a lot Rick for this informative article
Posted by: Sanjeev | January 16, 2009 9:32 AM
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This is another solution…
http://www.strategicblend.com/where-does-it-all-go-in-the-end/
Posted by: Strategic Blend | January 16, 2009 11:03 AM
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what I do is subscribe to all my various feeds of information in something like soup or tumblr or you can create a folder in google reader and publish that - basically anything to amalgamate all the feeds in one feed, then I use a service that turns this feed into email, which I get sent to gmail and have a filter set up so it all just gets stored away.
Posted by: juniorbonner | January 16, 2009 2:33 PM
Source: feedproxy.google.com