Free Tools To Back Up Your Data From Cloud
Cloud computing means you can keep your data in web applications and contact it from any browser, everywhere – but that doesn’t mean you don’t require a backup plan to protect your data when a storm’s a-brewing in the cloud with these tools. Depending on an outside service to host, update, and preserve the software you love and the data you require is both the cloud’s benefit and inconvenience: you’re putting your things on computers you don’t manage at a single point of access (or failure). Companies get shut down or bought, accounts get protected up, servers (and you) go offline. If you store your email, photos, documents, contacts, bookmarks, and journal entries in the cloud, there are easy ways to back up all that information from popular online services to your computer.
You most important cloud data is probably in your email account based at Yahoo, Windows Live, Gmail, or some other service. If your webmail uses POP, then downloading messages is all you have to do to properly back them up. You can make this process automatic with fetchmail for your Gmail account, if you’re comfortable using the command line. Otherwise, Thunderbird (which uses mbox files) or other desktop clients will download your messages; just remember to use these clients every few weeks.
The popular photo-sharing service Flickr is used by people who want to upload photos from their hard drive or cell phone to the web site for safe keeping. If a user’s hard drive crashes and they want to restore their photos from the service there are utilities in place that will help them do so. FlickrTouchr script is one of these utilities. It downloads the photos in a Flickr account in their original size and saves them to folders based on the set names. FlickrEdit app is another such utility which is a Java-based free application that can back up a user’s photos, contacts’ photos, or any subset of photos depending on what is chosen.
If documents, spreadsheets, and presentations are piling up in a Google Docs account and need to be backed up, use Windows-only GDoc Backup. It is a free utility that exports all documents from the desktop at once by downloading only the documents that do not exist on the computer or have an older date. Mac and Linux users can use GDataCopier instead.
Many tweets are just fly-by-night thoughts that cross people’s minds so there’s no need to save them. Others, however, need to be backed up because you want to have access to them later. This is especially true if you’re getting close to the 3,200 tweets allowed for each account by Twitter on its website. You can store tweets in a variety of ways: downloading the tweet XML via cURL, for instance, or using the Backup My Tweets web application. In the latter case, you first have to tweet about Backup My Tweets. Then you get a free trial and can download tweets in HTML, PDF, or JSON format.
There are not many Facebook backup suites, when compared to the number of facilities for Twitter. Social Safe is one of the few good ones, an Adobe AIR application that charges $3 to back up your Facebook profile, photos, list of friends, and photos tagged with your name. On the other hand, Social Safe won’t back up your comments, wall posts, or status stream; you should expect more from a paid service.
These days people are putting extensive time and effort into their blogs only to be side railed by server outage, database blow-ups, and host lockouts which erase a user’s posts. The best methods of backing up a blog will always depend on the service that is used. Tumbler users should of course have tumble-log backup utility, while WordPress users should have the WP-DB-Backup plug-in which emails or saves regular backups to your blog’s database. It is also recommend backing up your web server with rsync and a regular mysqldump command. If the user is hosted on Blogger or another service, they should use a web site copying utility to spider the pages and save them as HTML on their computer. It is also possible to mirror an entire web site to a hard drive using the command line tool wget and to backup bookmarks using cURL. For more how-to information for your Mac or PC, check out How Do I Back Up My Blog? at Lifehacker.