What To Expect From Your Initial Backups

by Rob on December 23, 2009

Wow.  We have signed up a lot of people.  Thank you all for your willingness to try us out.  We are young, just 13 months old as a company, and so we are going through some growing pains with all of these new users, but we love it.  We believe you should control your own data, and we have hundreds, probably more like thousands, of ideas around that. For now, here are some things you should know…

Initial backups normally take 24-48 hours.  We have 20 thousand people queued up trying to back stuff up, but servers have limits, APIs for these services have limits, and so some of these things take time.  Initial backups are particulary long because we are backing up so much data.  Given the sudden surge in users, they are going to be even a little longer than normal.  So I thought it would help to let you know what to expect when you start to see data.

1.  You should see something within 48 hours, but for the next few days, allow 72 hours.  Please don’t email before that if you don’t see your data because you take time away from other users who have real configuration problems.

2.  If you don’t see something within 72 hours, please email us.  We want to make sure your backups are working.

3.  When you data is backed up, some of it is ugly.  For instance, all your non-picture Facebook stuff is crammed into one big XML file.  It isn’t easy on the eyes.  But it’s there, and you can do stuff with it if you have to.  And we will give you the ability to do more with it in the future as we grow and add features.  Some of the data is in decent format.  You will notice that once a week, we generate a nice PDF of all your tweets.  It’s a great feature so I encourage you to download it and take a look.

4.  You can download all your data to your computer if you want, but for some services, that is difficult. For instance, downloading Flickr pictures requires you to do them one at a time.  We are trying to make that easier and in the future, will offer more options to zip stuff up and download it all at once.  We are also integrating storage options other than Amazon, per your request.  But these things take time.  We will keep you updated.

5.  Deleting data is intentionally difficult.  Since our primary value proposition is backup, we can’t make deletion too easy because then we will have people doing it accidentally.  If you need to delete something, please contact us.  In Feb/Mar, we will have a better solution.

6. You should start getting emails from us about what is backed up. If not, please login and check your settings page.

7.  Send us feedback.  This is YOUR data, so what do you want to do with it?

8.  Some things will break. They always do. Tony Robbins already broke our Twitter backup. Breaking is part of the process of making it better, so please let us know when you break something so that we can fix it.

9. Tell your boss we will soon have business accounts. Your company should sign up when we start offering them.

That’s it for now. Welcome to Backupify. Let us know what we can do to help you control your online data.

  • http://www.rentvine.com Dave Dugdale

    I just heard about your service on Buzz Out Loud podcast and had to give it a try. Thanks for this great service. And I think you have a great name.

  • http://thedaneshproject.com Danesh

    Awesome service guys, Thanks :D

  • Frank Paulino

    Yeah, I also heard of you guys on the Buzz Out Loud podcast. I have to say great service, you never know when you might need a backup.

  • Ram

    If you want to succeed, why would you even use the AOL name anywhere, forget using it as an analogy (to Facebook or whatever). I hated that service, always. I hated it even in its supposed “prime”. Remember, “AOL words” on ever ad?! If you also remember, Steve Case once said the Internet was all a hype. I don’t how much Bill Gates’ own such disparaging remarks influenced but we all know how he screwed AOL and Time Warner and his customers. As for AOL users, I always teased them and still do. Sorry, I disagree with you – they are not your “average Users”. They are luddites and imbeciles and such likes. I’m ready to admit some of my close friends still use it and I say the same to them. I refuse to get onto the AOL chat with them. Even ICQ (which AOL acquired and screwed up; much like Netscape…). So, just stop the bad words if you want my business :-) Ok, I was kidding there.

  • earlwallace

    Wonderful so far. I do see strange formats of backed up Hotmail and just random numbers in the Twitter archive. All is well though for you state this will be straightened out in the future. This is a novel idea and your business smarts show by using Amazon. I’m curious to see what the premium will cost.
    Grateful for beta!
    earlwallace

  • http://www.kopis.de/ Carsten

    Guys, I really hope you can add a “zip & download” to the backup archives. That would really feel good and give this service a great opportunity. I like to have my data on my own PC as well as in the clouds – we all now that there sometimes is rain in the clouds – and I’d like to download all my Flickr images at once, for example. I think there is a way to use EC2 for that, to start up an instance, get the data from S3, zip it all back to S3.