Should you backup your Flickr account? Do you care if you lose your Google Docs data? Doesn’t Basecamp have their own backups in case something happens to your account?
When I tell people about Lifestreambackup, I usually get one of two responses… either “awesome, I need something like this,” or I get questions like the ones listed above. Very few people, so far, are middle of the road types who think it’s just ok. Questions about why you should backup your lifestream are valid, so this post will explain some of the reasons why I think it is important.
Your Lifestream Contains Important Data
You probably spend a lot of time online. You push a lot of data into Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, and similar sites. Would you be upset if your favorite site shut down? What if your favorite site stayed up, but you lost your account? Are the notes, pictures, and links important to you? How long did it take to build the connection/friends/followers you have? Do you want to re-do all of that work?
If you are a freelancer or run a small business, do you have client data out on Zoho, Basecamp, Google Docs, and other sites that run in the cloud? Do you use Freshbooks or Clarity or any cloud based invoicing or accounting tools? How important is all of that data to you? Do you need it to run your business? If the data you store online is important to you, the smart thing to do is back it up.
Reason #1 for backing up your lifestream is that the data you create is important and like all important data, it should be backed up.
Time is Money
Do you have lots of free time? If not, then the time you have spent adding friends on Facebook, following people on twitter, or building a network on LinkedIn is valuable and rebuilding these networks is not something you want to do again. With Lifestreambackup, if you lose your social network, we can rebuild it in minutes because we have a backup that is essentially a list of everyone you were connected to, and it is in a format that is easy to push back into the service you were using.
Reason #2 for backup up your lifestream is that it will save you lots of time in the event of a data loss.
It Doesn’t Cost Much, So It Is Better to Be Safe Than Sorry
I pay $40 a month for life insurance. Even though I am young and healthy and very very unlikely to pass away any time soon, I don’t mind paying a small fee so that if the unlikely event happens, my family is taken care of. Most of the services we support are unlikely to ever go down, and your chances of real data loss are statistically very small. But it does happen sometimes, and for less than $40/year you can save yourself a lot of headache in the unlikely event you lost part of your lifestream.
Reason #3 to back up your lifestream: At these low prices, it’s better to be safe than sorry.
All In One Place
Some of the data we back up is data you probably have stored elsewhere. Pictures or videos that you have uploaded to Flickr or Photobucket are likely to be stored on your computer’s hard drive. Documents in Google Docs or Basecamp or Zoho are likely to be printed out as hard copies somewhere and could be replicated if needed. But the longer you use the online services, the more likely that your photos are spread out across multiple old computers. You end up with drafts of documents stored on your work computer, your home computer and your laptop. So if you have this data backed up elsewhere, it is likely all over the place.
And of course, if something happens such as a house fire or laptop theft, your backups may be gone or destroyed. With Lifestreambackup, all of the data from all of your accounts is stored in single place, on Amazon’s scalable storage system, which is in their state of the art data centers using cutting edge technology.
Reason #4 to backup your lifestream is so that all the data you have scattered across the web is backed up in a single place, making it easy to manage.
It’s Easy
If you wanted to backup your lifestream on your own, you would have to log in to each of the services that you use, and download all the files to your computer, if that service allows it. In the case of a service like twitter, you would have to copy and paste all your tweets into a text file. Your only other option is to write a software program that issues the appropriate API commands to each of these services. We have already done that for you. With Lifestreambackup, all you have to do is enter your login credentials (which we store with 1024-bit RSA encryption) and then sit back and wait while we automatically generate regular backups.
Reason #5 to backup your lifestream is that Lifestreambackup.com makes it simple, automated, and painless.
A Bigger Cloud Increases the Odds of Data Loss
Is the cloud safe? Yes. For the most part, it is. But the more we move away from hard disks and local software to cloud based applications and data stored in far away places, the more likely something will fail. Flickr or Facebook or Google or any other online software provider is unlikely to lose your data, but the more online tools you use, the more likely at least one of them will have a problem.
The larger the cloud grows, the more opportunities it presents for hackers. Even if Gmail or Photobucket never loses your data, the odds that someone hacks your account are ever growing.
Many of these cloud based apps are shared environments and the more people use them, the more likely someone will make a mistake when they change your data. How do you recover that?
Reason #6 for backing up your lifestream is that a bigger cloud with more users increases the chances of losing something.
To this I will add one reason that is very personal to me… my daughter. I have a one year old and I frequently take videos of her and store them in a Photobucket account. Then I embed the videos on a blog so that friends and family who don’t see her regularly can still watch her grow up. These videos are important to me. They are so important that even though I have copies on my computer, copies on Photobucket, and copies on an external hard drive, I back up my entire Photobucket account to my Lifestreambackup account. It’s an easy and painless way to make sure there is one more set of copies of my most important digital files.
We are in a unique business because much like insurance companies, we are offering you a service that we hope you never really need. But bad things happen. Unexpected things, low probability things, random things, can sometimes cause data loss that you never anticipated. If it happens to you, we are there to help you restore you important data as quickly and easily as possible. So sign up today for an account, and rest assured that your online data is safe.
