Backup Your Online Social Life

We all have an abundance of social networks that we update on a daily basis sometimes, so it makes since to back up your updates - you know - just in case. Lifestream Backup is a new service that backs up your data from a handful of popular online services including Flickr, Twitter, BaseCamp, Google Docs, and WordPress. You just provide it with your log-in credentials (or give it permission through authentication), and it quietly makes a daily or weekly backup of all your data from each site. It can then be viewed and downloaded if one of those places suffers an outage or data loss. Not that data loss happens often, but how nice would it be to know you won't ever loose your data?

I tried it out for Twiter and really enjoyed it. It saved all of my past tweets in an XML file which could not be viewed in Firefox, IE, or Chrome. Instead I had to open it up in Windows Notepad They were all there, going all the way back to 2005 when I started my account. Not a bad start, however, I would like to see (in a future update) a way to incorporate all this data into an easy document of some sort.

Same goes for other networks. If you have a Flickr account, Lifestream Backup will scour through all your photos ever posted and back them up. Pretty cool, eh? Unfortunatey, Facebook is not yet an option, but it is coming soon. There are a few more sevices that it backs up as well. For $30 a year you get 20GB of storage, which is shared across all of the different services and hosted on Amazon's S3. If you have your own S3 account it's only $15 for the whole year, and it does not impose any storage limits since you're paying for that separately through Amazon. I've seen better prices for more storage, however, if you are looking to backup just data across all your social networks and documents, then that is pleanty of space. Just not for pictures since many of us have pictures that'll take terrabytes to backup!

But don't take my word for it. Take a look at it and let them know what you think about their sevice by signing up today!