httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5C4PVmkJKsk I'm a pretty heavy Gmail user, and my ties to their mail service are only going to get deeper once my day job puts their mail infrastructure on "the Googles" in the coming months. I obviously put a lot of faith in Google's ability to protect my data, both from theft but also from destruction. But as an sysadmin, I know that people make mistakes. Systems fail. Sometimes using Gmail does have hiccups. Sometimes I mistakes. (Rare I know, but possible.) It's not just Gmail though where my data is stored in the cloud. As an avid photographer I have quite a collection of image on Flickr, and then there is my social presence on Facebook and Twitter. How does one go about protecting all of this data that is created, but stored on systems not under their control? For me, it's Backupify. Backupify is a freemium service that can protect a variety of data on services such as, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sites, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, Picasa, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Blogger, and Zoho. Backupify, as you can see from the video above, uses the native APIs that are there for each service to access or backup your data, and stores it away from the source, on Amazon's S3 service. Because it's using public APIs you're not going to anger Google, and since S3 is geographically distributed and replicated the risk of your backup dropping off the Amazon cloud is minimal.

The free service is all I can speak from experience about, as I have been using it for a few weeks to protect all of my Google data. The free account will protect 5 different accounts and a maxium of 2GB of data, which I would push the limits when I start adding other services and will exceed once my corporate email was incorporated. The free service also backs up your data once per week. When I signed up for the free service, and after my first full backup was completed, I got a nice email from a guy named Ryan at Backupify who said he was my personal support representative. While the message was undoubtedly generated by an automated form, I thought it was a nice personal touch for a free service to reach out and contact me. My congressman doesn't even email me, and had to vote for him! (Well, actually, I didn't vote for the one I have, but that's another story for another blog.) For $5 per month you can protect 25 accounts (I can't imagine having more than that I'd want protected) and up to 20GB of data, which should be more than sufficient for most users. Also, by subscribing you get your data backups done nightly, which for a personal Gmail Inbox or a Facebook account may seem excessive, but if you're storing business messages in Google, it's essential. Paying also gets you access to phone support, in addition to your personal rep. Now, I'm sure Google will backup your data. But have you ever thought about what would be required for you to restore an individual message or set of messages? Yeah, if a Google server goes down, you're probably not going to lose anything. But what happens if Google goes under tomorrow, or they become evil? Wouldn't you want a safe place for all that email? All and all, I think it's a really solid service and I suggest it for anyone who wants to keep their cloud data protected. For the price of free, I honestly think it's stupid for someone not to be using them to protect your Gmail account, at the very least.