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It seems that Twitter's problems a few days ago resulted in loss of the tweets for our @backupmymail account. Thankfully, we are a backup company and can do something about these sorts of problems...
Backupmytweets.com?
Keep an eye out for it.
BackupMyMail now supports both GMail and Hotmail (and Windows Live). So give it a try while it's still free. For a limited time, all new accounts get 30 days free.
BackupMyMail is a simple way to backup your online email account. All you need to do is sign up and input your emaili account info. BackupMyMail takes it from there. Every day, your account's contents will be copied over to the BackupMyMail servers and stored in case you need it.
To make our service even more useful, we keep track of which emails you delete so that you can download a backup of your email acount from a specific point in time. If you accidentally delete an important message today, you can download a snapshot of your account from yesterday, for example.
If you'd like to give it a try, sign up here.
TechCrunch is reporting what many Hotmail users already know - they were completely locked out of their email accounts. For how long depends on whom you ask. Microsoft says two hours. TechCrunch readers say more. That Microsoft does not even know the scale of the problem is indicative of how complex these systems are. And as we all know, complexity goes hand in hand with down time.
To add insult to injury, users were told that they did not have an inbox at all! Microsoft says that is not the case, and that all the data is still there, but that is not something I need to see when I log into my email in the morning! Life is stressful enough.
I've been told by people that they don't need BackupMyMail because big companies like Yahoo, Microsoft and Google have good, reliable systems. I submit that while the big co's are pretty darn good, they can and do suffer major interruptions and occasional data loss. Google it - this is just one of many examples.
As more users depend on free email accounts for their important business and personal communications, these outages will become a bigger and more apparent problem. Just because it's in the cloud doesn't mean that it's not going to fail. How important is your email?
I recently got an email from Kodak Gallery, the photo sharing/printing website run by the familiar camera/film manufacturer. It was the type of email you easily overlook - a change to the terms of service. In fact, I'm not sure what made me read this one in the first place, since this stuff normally winds up in the trash after 2-3 seconds of scanning.
I'm glad I did read it, because it had some pretty important information in it:
This doesn't give me a warm and fuzzy feeling about how safe my data is with Kodak Gallery. And the fact that I could easily have missed this email didn't help.
This isn't entirely Kodak Gallery's fault. Overzealous marketers have been bombarding us with so much information and legalese that it's not surprising that we are conditioned to ignore even the more important messages coming from companies. And what other choice do they have? They can't call me - I'd be annoyed. They can't send me paper mail, because I'd throw it away unopened. No, the best they can do is send me an email and hope I actually read it.
But that's not good enough. The bottom line is that there are a lot of people out there who don't know that their photos are not safe from deletion on Kodak Gallery.
We're happy to announce that BackupMy.Net's first product is now available to beta customers.
BackupMyMail will back up your web-based email account. It's simple to use: you just input your email account information and we start backing it up and storing it off-site (you don't need to store it on your own computer). Your account will be checked daily and it's backup will be updated automatically. If you need a copy, you can choose any date and download your account as it looked on that date.
BackupMyMail currently supports Gmail and Google Apps accounts, with Hotmail support just around the corner. Yahoo Mail support is coming soon. Normally $19.95 per year, we're offering free 30 day trials to beta users, so go sign up and give it a whirl. And let us know what you think of the product on our Feedback page.
If I had a nickle for every time I heard someone say, "I don't get Twitter.", I'd be very wealthy. But if I had a penny for every time I heard someone say, "Check out this cool trick I'm doing with Twitter.", I'd be even wealthier.
As people come up with more inventive uses for Twitter, the data stored in the service becomes more valuable. Twitter is no longer consumed with "I had oatmeal for breakfast". Instead we are stating to see "Lisa took her first step today: video here- http://example.com/video" or "OMG - my plane just crashed" or "500 error on server 2".
If you're using Twtter as a baby book, a diary, or even a server logging system, you start to get my point. Twitter is no longer confined to throw-away data. But it seems Twitter, the company, is so busy with their massive growth, that they just haven't managed to keep our data as safe as they could.
For instance, Search Twitter for "lose tweets".
It's not hard to find a user who lost a lot of their data. Now, this is a time sensitive link, and hopefully things will improve. (If you're reading this in 2011, maybe there won't be anything in the search!). But until then, it would be nice to be able to archive our tweets on our own.
Stay tuned...
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