Are you backing up your blog and other social sites? Here's how...

Please scroll to end of the post for updated information about backing up your content.

How would you feel and what would you do if you lost all your blog posts? Of if all the content you posted on Facebook disappeared because your account was hacked?

I know this seems obvious, but I frequently encounter people who are not backing up their content and databases on a regular basis.

First, make sure you're computer files are being backed up regularly. When I switched to Carbonite Online Backup a couple of years ago, I stopped thinking about it. Backup of my computer files is ongoing, whenever a new file is saved to my hard drive. For 60 bucks a year, it's worth it for peace of mind alone.

Next, back up any databases you maintain. I use KickStartCart for my list management and ecommerce system. I have a reminder on my calendar to back up my product and client database on the last day of every month. Maybe I should do it weekly. It's a simple spreadsheet export. I also export my sales reports at the end of every month.

Back up your blog posts at least once a month. Here's info about backing up TypePad. There are plug-ins for Wordpress that automatically run backups. I'm using Wordpress Database Backup for sites I have built on Wordpress.

Backup Facebook. For $2.99 you can get a license for SocialSafe and backup  your Facebook Profile. Note: you can't back up your Fan page, but that's in development. This is software you download to your computer and the backups reside on your hard drive. You must run this manually.

Backup your online accounts: Gmail, Google docs, Flickr, Del.icio.us, Basecamp, Twitter, etc. I use Backupify (you can get one year free right now). You'd probably be surprised at how much of your data lives in "the cloud." What happens if it disappears? Automatically, every week, my online data is backed up and files are placed in an archive. I get an email when the backup has been done.

The backup for twitter is an awesome pdf document of all your tweets, DMs, favorites, etc. for a week.

So...when is the last time you backed up your valuable content? Is there a service or tool you would add to this list?

UPDATE (October 2010): Here's an article on FastCompany.com with more tips for backing up your social sites.

UPDATE (April 2011): here's a site that has great info about backing up your data as well as links to data backup comparisons.

UPDATE (June 2011)  Click here to download a comparison chart of online backup and storage sites.

UPDATE: (August 2011) Click here for complete how to for backing up all your Google accounts.

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Comments

[Julius]

I frequently back up our site's blog content, but I never thought of backing up my content in Facebook. I think it's time I started to do so as I've done lots of posting in my facebook account. Thanks.

[MaAnna Stephenson]

Fantastic post, Denise! The online backup resource links are very helpful. I've been doing manual backups to an external hard drive for years, but am starting to switch over to online backups. It's just cheaper and more reliable. I'll definitely be sharing this info with my friends and clients.

[Rick Noel of eBiz ROI, Inc.]

Nice blog post and very relevant. Imagine the amount of effort that would be lost if you lost 100 blog posts or a years worth of content from your Facebook page.

If people thought of their data in terms of $ based on the commercial value of time spent authoring and posting, then protecting that value might be more obvious. The problem is that often times the need isn't obvious until its too late.

The nice thing online backup services is that it is truly "set it and forget it" with providing the added benefit offsite storage which is some industries, is a requirement. This protects users from issues with theft, fire or other common causes of data loss. If you external hard drive is next to the computer you back up, unless your thief or fire is IT-sensitive with some conscious, there goes your back-up with your data.

With these online back-up services available at $60/yr/computer, No more old school, weekend, hard drive swap rally's at the local safety deposit boxes just to achieve offsite backups!

[Dan Morris]

Backupify is not bad for your social sites, but that's not the only one. In fact there are at least three sites like that for your Facebook and MySpace.

Backupify works for Twitter, too. When I was writing my Twitter book, I actually found there are a bunch of 3rd party sites that actually catalog your Twitter followers and allow you to follow them all at once should your account get deleted or hacked.

I was surprised how many resources there really are.

[Denise Wakeman]

Hey Dan, care to share a couple of those alternative resources for backing up your social sites? I know my list isn't complete.

Thanks!

[lilidauphin]

Thanks Denise. Great information. I didn't even know of so many different resources and I'm sure I am not alone.

[Jaydee]

I haven't done backing up my blog/s as I am very confident my web servers are doing it for me, isn't? anyway that is what I am told...

Good points and tips, thanks!

[Susanne Myers]

Great post and something I have never thought about regarding social media and gmail. I back up my blogs regularly, but didn't think there was even an option to backup things like twitter, facebook and gmail. Adding this to my "to-do" list for the week.

[Lily Iatridis]

Oh my goodness! I've been trying to figure out how to do this over the past few weeks! Thanks for appearing with the answer.
Best,
Lily

[Gretchen Jack]

Thanks for this information. Since my site just "went down" and we lost everything and we hadn't backed it up since August ( oversight)...this is very timely information. It took a LOT of work to get my site restored....I will make sure that doesn't happen again!