Today I was alerted by FranK Gruber of a new service created to backup your Lifestream. The site is available at the very starightforward and appropriately named Lifestreambackup.com and they are currently taking names for those interested when they launch.
From the site:
Each year more of your life is stored online. While many services will back up your desktop, we haven’t found anything that will backup your lifestream. So we are building it. In a couple of weeks, we will launch with the ability to manage all of your online accounts in one place. You enter your credentials once per site, set it for daily or weekly backup, and then we do the rest
image courtesy of Flickr user alexmuse
Frank did an interview with one of the founders. During the video they discuss some of the concepts at a high level. The service appears to act as an interface and conduit to get the data you create on an initial set of supported web services (Flickr, Blog via RSS, Google Docs, Twitter, Youtbue, and Facebook initially) to an Amazon S3 account. They exclaim that “If it has an API that allows us to pull data, we are happy to back it up for you”. They also offer the ability to link to your own S3 account if you already have one to save on the $6.95 per 10Gb monthly charge.
Other than that there aren’t any more details. I’m very curious as to how the service will work. I’m wondering what the UI and configuration options will look like. I’m also curious as to what actual data will be stored and what the associated formats will be. In any case this sounds like a geat idea and beyond being useful as a backup it can also be a great archive. If an interface can get written to pull, display and search the data as well it could become very useful. Also with recent announcements from Google about closing down services and no doubt more of this trend to occur in the future, creating backups seems like a very important proposition. I’m looking forward to its release so I can try it out.
Here is the video Frank created:
For the life of me I can't decipher what they mean when they say they will “backup” your lifestream. Let's say you have five RSS feeds that you want to have backed up. Do they create a single stream from all the posts that you can view as html? Do they create a database? Do they capture the comments? In the case of Google Docs or Flickr are they stripping out media and saving it on a directory somewhere? This really doesn't make sense to me.
Think about this. Why do you need a backup of a photo that you uploaded to Flickr or a video you uploaded to YouTube? It's already on your hard drive. And if you want to backup the content of all of your RSS feeds you can install a desktop based feed reader and import the content everyday. Or you could use Google Reader to the same thing and have it web based.
We'll see what they come up with at launch but so far it's nothing that's too special and certainly not worth paying for.
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