Social media backup

April 21 2009, 10:59pm

Imagine one day all of your flickr photos are gone. Or your blog posts. Or your youtube videos. Do you have backups of that content? If you're like me, then probably not. I upload photos from my phone then delete them. I blog and forget to backup my database. And I twitter important notes to myself all the time. A recent scare with flickr marking my account as "unsafe" made me realize how important my lifestream has become to me as a backup tool.

The specific software I use for this site, Sweetcron, allows me to choose services to back up. Running on my own server, when it receives my RSS feeds, it makes copies of blog posts, photos, and tweets in my own database. So I will always have access to backups of my data, even if flickr bans me for good.