Oct
6
Written by:
host
10/6/2009 7:00 AM
Last week, popular church futurist Len Sweet was temporarily banned from Facebook after someone tagged one of his podcast links as hostile. That action had ripple effects, and before long his iTunes podcast was being blocked or seen as spam by some of the major internet blocklists. The content in the podcast can hardly be seen as hostile (listen to it here if you wish), but the incident raises many questions. Here's one practical one: what happens to all of your digital "stuff" (photos, podcasts, blog posts, Facebook friends, etc.) if for one reason or another you are blocked or a website goes out of business?
The reality is that when it comes to web businesses, you may have little or no warning before everything you created goes poof. If that possibility gives you chills, what's the solution? As with all of the data on your computer's hard drive, it's summed up in four words: Backup. Your. Stuff. Regularly.
You can't use the same software to backup both your computer and everything you have "in the cloud," at least not with any program I've come across. But, there are various free programs for backing up Twitter posts, Facebook pictures, Google documents, and the like. Generally, these programs work for just one social networking tool, and they sometimes have limited feature sets. More reliable and simple -- and what I personally recommend -- is the service called Lifestream Backup. For $5/month (or just $30/year, or $15/year if you have an inexpensive Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) account), you can backup your Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Delicious, Google Docs, Gmail, and other online services, and more are being added to the service on a regular basis. If your ministry and/or personal life relies on tools like these (and whose doesn't these days?) then you need to start regularly backing up your lifestream, the "cumulative stream of information about yourself that you leave on sites all over the web."
~ Tim Gossett