Social Networking Backup

Backup Your Facebook, Twitter and Gmail Info

Today millions of people are enjoying the connections made through social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. However, as these once strictly for fun networks evolved into serious communication tools, the value of the information stored on these sites has increased exponentially. Unfortunately, these sites offer little in the way of backing up the information that is contained in their user accounts. This is where social media backup services come into play.

There are many reasons why you might want to backup your social media accounts. What would happen to all your posts, photographs, profile entries, and friend lists if that site had technical difficulties, shut down, locked you out, or started charging a fee for access? What if your account got hacked or deleted? For some people, it would be no big deal. Others might consider it a devastating loss. A social media backup tool can provide peace of mind and save you a lot of time if you need to restore your account.

In addition to this, you might want to back up your social media accounts so that you can access the information when you are offline. Offline access to Tweets and social networking entries is valuable because it allows you to extract contact information, comments, photos and other data that is important to you. Offline access also allows you to sort and organize the data that is contained in your social networking account for easier analysis and access. Backing up your social media data will also allow you to find messages that have been deleted, either accidentally by you, or purposely by others. This is a valuable option as lost posts can contain important information that both you, your friends and followers need.

SocialSafe

One of the backup services for social media sites is called SocialSafe. This is one of the few backup options that you have for your Facebook account. It is not a free service, but it only costs $2.99 and this includes add-ons and updates. To use SocialSafe you will need to download the Adobe Air platform application and install it on your mobile device or computer. You can then backup everything in your Facebook account, including your photos, photos that you were tagged in, your posts and your profile information. SocialSafe works with Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7, as well as with Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard.

One you back up your Facebook account, you can access all the files offline with a text editor, word processor, or photo editing software -- without having to connect to your Facebook account. The developers of SocialSafe say they plan to include other sites in their service, so one might assume that Myspace is on the top of their priority list. Until then, the next best thing is this tutorial which explains how to backup your Myspace messages.

Backup My Tweets

Backup My Tweets is a social media backup service that works with Twitter. Unlike SocialSafe, BackupMyTweets is a free service. It allows you to back up all of your tweets, which is a huge advantage since Twitter does not store more than 3200 tweets at a time. The parent company for BackupMyTweets also offers backup services for email accounts, blogs and online photographs. The backups offered by this site will allow you to save your social media files as an XML file, as a JSON file or as an HTML file.

Webmail Backup Tips

As I was writing this article, I thought "What would happen if Gmail suddenly disappeared, or if I lost access to my account?" No problem, just sign in to Gmail, click on the Export link, and oh wait... there is no Export link! Gmail does not provide a feature to easily export or backup your webmail account.

You *can* export your Gmail contacts (address book) pretty easily. Just sign in to Gmail, then click the Contacts link on the left side of the page. Click Export at the top of the Contacts page, and then you can save all your contacts in a CSV file on your hard drive. And Gmail Labs has a feature that lets you import and export filters. Click on Settings, then Labs to enable the Filter import/export feature.

So what about all the emails? Fortunately, there is a free third-party program called Gmail Backup that does this task very well. It will export all your messages, attachments, and labels to a folder on your hard drive. Everything is plain text, so you can search this backup with a text editor or command line tools. Gmail Backup works for Windows XP, Vista, Linux, and Mac OS X. (If you're a linux geek and you've always wanted to run grep searches on your Gmail messages, this is exactly what you need.)

Another option is BackupMyMail, from the same people that created BackupMyTweets. The BackupMyMail program works with Gmail, Hotmail, or Windows Live accounts. For completeness, I'll also mention that it's possible to use a an IMAP mail client such as Outlook to export your webmail messages, but it's a little harder to set it up. Programs such as Outlook Express Backup Tiger for Hotmail, and YPOPs for Yahoo Mail will help you configure an IMAP-based webmail backup.

Do you backup your social media or webmail data? Post your comment or question below...