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Free Cloud Backup at Backupify (Till January 31st)

Gina Trapani — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 16:54:38 +0000

Cloud data backup service, Backupify, has dropped its paywall until January 31st in an effort to acquire more customers. The service backs up Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Google Docs, WordPress, Delicious, and FriendFeed data, to name a few, though apparently the file format you get when you restore your data may not be the most useful to non-programmers (i.e., XML documents). I haven't tried Backupify myself, but this offer is tempting. ZDNet's Between the Lines blog has the full story: Backupify drops paywall; backs up your data from Twitter, Facebook, and Gmail.

Free Tools to Back Up Your Cloud Data

Gina Trapani — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 16:24:25 +0000

Cloud computing lets you store your data in web applications and access it from any browser, anywhere—but that doesn't mean you don't need a backup plan. Next time your favorite web site is down or you're locked out of an account, make sure you've got the crucial info you need where you can get to it: on your computer.

"But I don't need backup if my data's in the cloud," you say. "Big companies with lots of servers are better at backup than little old me could ever be." That's true, but cloud computing does come with risks. Depending on an external service to host, update, and maintain the software you love and the data you need is both the cloud's advantage and disadvantage: you're putting your stuff on computers you don't control at a single point of access (or failure). Companies get shut down or bought, accounts get locked up, servers (and you) go offline. If you store your email, photos, documents, contacts, bookmarks, and journal entries in the cloud, safeguard your data for when a storm's a-brewing with these handy tools.

Read the rest at Lifehacker »

How to Back Up Your Full-Size Flickr Images by Set

Gina Trapani — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 21:13:29 +0000

If you email photos to Flickr directly from your phone like I do, you probably don't always have a copy of the images you've published online on your computer. There are a few applications that back up your Flickr photos, but right now I'm digging Dan Benjamin's (admittedly geeky) Python script, FlickrTouchr.

FlickrTouchr doesn't support video uploads or grab any metadata about your photos (like tags, comments, favorites, etc). But it does arrange your backups by set name. In one command, you authorize FlickrTouchr to access our Flickr account, and it gets busy downloading your files. You'll need Python to run this and a folder to save your images. (Python comes in OS X, install it on Windows from here.) Here's what FlickrTouchr looks like in action.

Download FlickrTouchr and as per the README, invoke it using the commands:
$ mkdir FlickrBackupFolder $ python flickrtouchr.py FlickrBackupFolder

FlickrTouchr will launch your browser and open a page asking you to authorize it to access your Flickr account.

When it starts going you'll see it grabbing your images. Wherever you get the error "Failed to get original", FlickrTouchr is trying to get a video. Currently the script does not back up video files.

Once the script gets running, you can see it create folders of images on your hard drive based on your Flickr set names as it goes. If a photo isn't in any set, it gets saved in a folder called "No Set."

If you schedule this script to run on a weekly basis as Dan suggests, it will simply update the photos that don't already exist in your backup. Just the other day I was complaining about how non Flickr Pro users lose access to photos beyond the latest 200; this is a good way to ensure the full-size image files don't get lost in the ether once they're past that number.

Backing up Flickr [Hivelogic]