Back Up Your Tweets Easily

by Ben Parr

What would you do if all of the activity and data from your Twitter, Flickr, Delicious, or Wordpress accounts were to suddenly disappear? It’s not as far fetched as it sounds – social bookmarking service Ma.gnolia lost all user data permanently this year. And hackers, downtime, and errors happen all the time. The moral? Always have a backup.

Just as you save your essay constantly so you don’t lose your work, or back up your entire hard drive in case it crashes, it’s prudent to have a copy of your social media data. That information can be just as important as your email and personal files, but there hasn’t been an easy way to copy that data from the cloud. Enter Lifestream Backup, a service that will back up your Twitter, Flickr, Google Docs, and more.
The service’s premise is relatively simple: you want to protect your social media data in case of chatastrophic circumstances, failure, or just to have a copy for your own records. To do this, Lifestream Backup connects to your social accounts and pulls the data, pictures, blog posts, and files you’ve added, created, or associated with your accounts.

The actual process of backing up is easy, and the results are accessible without much issue. For Flickr, it stores a copy of your photos. For Twitter, it creates an XML file with every tweet you’ve ever made. In total, Lifestream Backup supports eight services: Twitter, Flickr, Photobucket, Google Docs, Wordpress, Delicious, Basecamp, and Zoho. And according to Lifestream, Facebook, Gmail, and YouTube support are coming soon.

In addition to accessing all of your backups, you can also see your backup history. The company will tell you when the backup began, when it finished, and the result. You can set the backups to occur either weekly or daily, and you can get email digests of backup activity. Backups also occur fast – even though it told me it would take a few hours, backing up my Flickr and Twitter only took minutes.

Backing up your social media doesn’t come free, though – the service costs $4.95 a month, which is similar to standard data backup service like Mozy. This may be a worthwhile price to pay if you’re a heavy social media user.

However, even Lifestream Backup isn’t a guarantee that your data is safe. It takes information in the cloud and places it into another cloud, powered by Amazon Web Services. While AWS is incredibly reliable, it’s not perfect, which is also why you can download the data from Lifestream Backup. Overall, this tool provides a service that many of us actually need, but will not realize until it’s too late.