Why Backupify is glad to see VaultPress show up

by Jay Garmon on April 12, 2010

WordPress
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A few people have asked whether Backupify is worried that Automattic, the makers of WordPress, have rolled out their own in-house WordPress backup service, VaultPress. The macho answer would be No, we ain’t afraid of nobody. The honest answer is that we expect a few users who would have used Backupify will use VaultPress instead, which means we may leave a few dollars on the table, but — honestly — we’re glad that VaultPress is around.

First, VaultPress is an admission from the makers of WordPress that WordPress could stand to have its data backed up to the cloud. If that isn’t an endorsement of our business model, I don’t know what is.

Second, we back up lots of services, not just WordPress, and we expect that almost all of them are going to openly or quietly roll out internal backup and recovery solutions in the near future, which we view as an opportunity. Google is already there with a premium Google Apps self-backup. On this count, users are being asked to rely on a single point of failure for their backups. Using Google servers to backup Google servers still puts you at risk of a systemic flaw in Google’s architecture. VaultPress will backup your data to different servers than your personal WordPress host, but you’re still relying on the same people who coded WordPress to preserve your data from a WordPress failure. I know more than a few IT managers who wouldn’t be comfortable with that arrangement.

Moreover, we sincerely doubt that users of multiple services across multiple accounts are going to want to manage multiple backup solutions. WordPress users will rely on VaultPress. WordPress, Google Apps, and Facebook combo users will (hopefully) prefer the one-stop-shopping backup option of Backupify.

Finally, Backupify’s longterm goal is to afford data portability, not just data integrity. If you like Flickr for photos today but prefer DeviantArt tomorrow, we hope to ease your migration from (or duplication across) one service to another. While VaultPress is no doubt a great product, Automattic has no incentive to ease your migration from WordPress to Moveable Type.

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  • photomatt

    I'm disappointed that FUD around WordPress as a competitive advantage, particularly this sentence: “you’re still relying on the same people who coded WordPress to preserve your data from a WordPress failure. I know more than a few IT managers who wouldn’t be comfortable with that arrangement.”

    WordPress and WordPress.com are of course different things, but ignoring that we've been doing backups on more than 11,000,000 blogs on WordPress.com for more than 4 years now with zero data loss. We're also profitable and going to be around for the long-term. That's a track record I'm very comfortable standing by.

    I think there's totally a space for something like Backupify if you want a single place to back up disparate services or if people want to entrust their backups to a free service built on S3. But for WordPress no one will be able to match our focus and tech chops. I've lived and breathed WordPress for 7 years, and plan to do so for many more.

    Regardless, I wish you guys best of luck. Maybe in the future someone could use Backupify to import their Flickr photos and Tweets into WordPress, and then back it up with VaultPress. And of course WordPress offers full exports and extremely comprehensive two-way APIs so there's never lock in.

  • robmay

    Hi Matt,
    Thanks for the comment. Sorry if the post is a bit misinterpreted. We were just pointing out that Valutpress indicates that yes, there is a demand for this stuff.

    Cheers,
    Rob

  • http://www.soundcult.com/ miguel

    well both backupify and vaultpress have their differences, vault is supposed to backup everything (database, themes, files, images…), and backupify just backs up the data, also since wordpress 2.9.1 backupify is unable to backup any of my wordpress blogs (says there is an error on the authentication), ohhh and if there are people that know wordpress is the wordpress crew, i think that as a plus for a service around wordpress.

    but still backing up my gmail or google docs is a huge plus, i have there years of documents that are invaluable for me ^_^ so thanks backupify!

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  • http://twitter.com/david_moeller david_moeller

    For anyone who wants an automatic daily backup for free, request to be added to CodeGuard’s beta test. As long as your site is less than 250MB there is no charge. Go to codeguard.com to request an account.