backupify for backing up social media & cloud data

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As I invest more and more time creating content on web sites
not under my control, I get more and more worried about it
disappearing one day. (in the tradition of egroups, lycos,
geocities et al.)

Backupify http://www.backupify.com/ seems to do a good job
of backing up various other sites, and it's free for life
if you sign up before Monday. [1]

I signed up a while ago and configured it to store stuff
in my own amazon s3 bucket; I grab a local copy of that
once in a while with:

   s3cmd sync s3://my-backupify-bucket-name .

That command creates a local dir tree containing files like:

   twitter/ger_dm_received.xml
   twitter/ger_dm_sent.xml
   twitter/ger_favorites.xml
   twitter/ger_followers.xml
   twitter/ger_friends.xml
   twitter/ger_mentions.xml
   twitter/ger_profile.xml
   twitter/ger_statuses.xml
   twitter/ger_book.pdf      (a 95-page book containing all the above)

   gdoc/6cb968a391d6d8da246f1966d6ed09ee.xls
   gdoc/8d90f0f6eec290a300eb1b24b03da9ce.doc
   gdoc/c414528a666d806382382344dbf36cae.ppt
   gdoc/e7970636cad109e2f5d694a1c9a9ce99.xls

   facebook/46009:858660153:Metadata.xml
   facebook/4771381436622983461.jpg
   facebook/807044588548170518.jpg
   facebook/807044588548170519.jpg
   [...]

The facebook dir includes all the photos I have been tagged in,
whether they're mine or not.

I'm not crazy about giving backupify access to all this data, but
it seems fairly well-run, and most of that data is already public.
(or in the case of facebook, visible to thousands of people,
which is effectively public)

One important thing I'm still missing are all the messages I have
sent or received on facebook; a couple days ago I discovered fbcmd [2]
which I plan to use to archive all my fb mail in rfc2822 format. [3]
I have a locally hacked copy that outputs messages in rfc2822 format
but haven't fully automated it yet; more on that soon.

[1] http://blog.backupify.com/2010/04/15/paywall-going-back-up-new-premium-packages-and-features/
[2] http://fbcmd.dtompkins.com/
[3] http://groups.google.com/group/fbcmd/browse_thread/thread/7530a8adc984a619#

--
Gerald Oskoboiny <[email protected]>
http://impressive.net/people/gerald/

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