With over 28,00 Facebook accounts, 600 Fan Pages and 34,000 Twitter  accounts backed up and under management at Backupify, many start to wonder what they can actually do with this data. The biggest question we get from users is how they can restore a lost or corrupted Facebook Profile, Fan Page or Twitter account.

The bottom line answer is that Twitter and Facebook don’t allow us to truly restore data back into the service. This is due to the fact that we can’t ‘backdate’ content to the time it was originally posted. For example, if you lost tweets between October 22 and November 1 and want to input those tweets back to Twitter, there is no way to backdate the tweets to the time and day they were originally published. The only way they could be put back into the service is to have them posted to the current day and time.

We could retweet all your old tweets, but they would hit the Twitter stream today as a giant explosion of content. We really don’t think your followers would like this. We could import all your Facebook statuses back into Facebook, but your friends may think your account has been hacked if they see twenty updates all at once on their news feed — especially if those updates are repeats of posts you made weeks ago. You don’t want to lose a Facebook friend over self-inflicted echo-spam.

We wish this process was easier. As soon as Twitter and Facebook allow backdating of data, we’ll be able to perform a true restore of these services.

For the time being, you can use this data for:

• Assurance that it’s never truly gone
• To save links and photos you’ve shared regardless of if they’re not available on the actual service
• To have in the case of a needed restore when the APIs allow for backdating

Plenty of users just want their lost Facebook photos or misplaced Twitter links back, even if they can’t backdate them into Facebook or Twitter. For those users, Backupify has got your back.

Tagged as: Backup, facebook, Restore, Twitter