The Cloud is becoming more and more used everyday. Their are companies starting up all the time and their are companies that close all the time. How many of us think to back up data we store in the cloud? My bet is not many of us. As far as I am concerned if you do not have 3 copies of something you do not have a backup.
This first became a major concern of mine many years ago. I was a Yahoo email user at one time and I had my account hacked. After battling with yahoo for over a month I gave up. I lost all the was stored in my account. Email addresses, emails and contacts were all gone. It was not a good situation and it took me a long time to recover from.
Today I am much more careful. I rely on Web 2.0 apps so much as part of my personal life and business life that I can not afford to lose the data I have stored in the Cloud.
One application that I live in is a Web 2.0 app called Evernote. Evernote is basically Microsoft’s One Note on Steroids. It is a note taking application that manages most of my life. It has information stored in it that I use multiple times a day. I access Evernote from every computer I use plus my Iphone. I back the data up from Evernote on a weekly basis to my local pc which is in turn backed up to my in house server and to Carbonite in the cloud.
I run several blogs including this one. On a weekly basis I back up my data by using the WordPress export feature to my local computer. The data is then backed up to my workgroup server and by Carbonite to another cloud based backup.
I constantly store videos on YouTube and pictures on Picasa Online. This are NOT my only copies of the videos/pictures. These are also copies on my home computer/Home server and my Carbonite Cloud backup.
I think this sort of explains that I do take the time time to keep multiple copies. This leaves an interesting question. What do I do about Twitter/FriendFeed posts and email.
Twitter and Friend Feed are sites where you post information on. The problem is their is no easy way to back them up. When I thought about writing this article I realized I was breaking my golden rule to practice what I preach. I asked a good friend of mine Bill Mitchell on Twitter(@askbillmitchell) on his thoughts and recommendations. Bill recommended a free service called Tweetake. Tweetake takes all your twitter information and backs it up into a spreadsheet. You can then save it on your local computer.
I aggregate all my friend feed posts into Twitter so these get backed up as well.
Email is another service that people forget to backup. Losing my contacts or saved email’s would be just devastating for me. I use a web hosting provider to host my email. Even though they back up my email for me I like to have some control. On a weekly basis I export all email and folders which I store in my hosted Exchange email account to my home pc using the export function in Outlook. I also do the same thing for my contact list. If you are using gmail, yahoo mail or any other mail program the same function can be preformed.
In summary the key is to do a regular backup of all your cloud data. Cloud services can go down or even close down for good. Investing time and energy into a service and losing all your data would not be good. It could cause great personal and business losses. I could not imagine losing all the data I have stored in the cloud.
They key is to get into a regular routine. Backups should be regular and the intervals in between should be based on the amount of data which you can afford to lose. Backing up is the best insurance against losing your data.
