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What Backupify is really about (Hint: It isn’t backups)

by Jay on February 25, 2010

: Image via Wikipedia

Henry Ford once famously said “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” In some circles this is taken as an admonition not to listen to customer requests. In what I would term smarter circles, this is a reminder to remember what your company is about.

Henry Ford wasn’t selling a replacement for the horse, he was selling personal transportation. It just so happened that his answer for the best possible personal transportation was a horse-replacement, the automobile.

Apple, which is perhaps best associated with the “ignore the customers, we know better than them” interpretation of Ford’s philosophy is nonetheless a great example of remembering what business you’re in. Apple wanted to sell a better portable music experience, which resulted in the iPod. But Apple isn’t in the MP3 player business. It’s in the portable music experience — or, rather, portable media experience — business, which is why the iPod has become somewhat ignored in favor of the iPhone, iTouch (which is so far removed from the original iPod people rarely call them iPod Touchs anymore) and iPad.

Which brings us to Backupify. Yes, we backup your cloud-based data, but we’re not really selling cloud data backups. That’s the mechanism, not the business.

Backupify is selling control of your cloud-based data.

Your Gmail messages are just messages you happen to store in Gmail; the service doesn’t own the data. Backupify exists to detach the data from the service, the profile data from the profile page, the medium from the message. If Gmail fails, the data is safe. If you want to analyze the data, you can download it from us and parse it however you like. If you want to migrate away from Gmail to another e-mail solution, we’ll do our best to facilitate the changeover.

The same applies to your Facebook profile or Flickr albums. Those are your videos and pictures and birthday wishes and commiserations with friends. They belong to you, not to the cloud, and not to any specific brand or application. Backupify is here to make sure of it. That’s our business. That’s what we’re selling (or, in most cases, giving away).

Backupify is in the data control business. It just so happens that backing up cloud-based data is where we’ve started. But if a better solution comes along, we’ll be ready for it.