Twitter, Flickr backup with LifestreamBackup

One of the main risks when using cool cloud services is that you really do not own your data, and you can easily lose everything by having your account hijacked or removed by the service. This has happened in the past to others and can happen in the future.

I’ve never had an account deleted without my consent (knock on wood), but I have lost access to my Flickr photos for months at a time, TWO years in a row, since Flickr/Yahoo seems incapable of accepting money from customers without months of prodding. It actually took me MONTHS to get them to process my credit card payment (and yes I am still bitter). They are lucky I have a lot of built-up loyalty given my years and years of (paid) membership and thousands of full-rez photos on the site, and they have no decent competition given the social aspect of their site (and Google charges way too much for large storage). So for months I could not get to most of my photos since my account was downgraded to the free version… all the while they prompted me to pay up when I already had!

One way to mitigate this risk, is to be able to backup what is important, and this is where Lifestreambackup comes into it. They have managed to create a very easy to use service that currently can automatically backup Twiter, Flickr, Delicious, Google Docs, WordPress, and others. YouTube and Facebook are coming soon they say.

They are pretty cheap at $5/m ($4 on sale) or $30/year ($27 on sale). I actually opted for another option they have, which is to use your own S3 account, which I think it just brilliant. S3 is Amazon’s cloud storage service and is basically where many new websites are storing everything. It is not fail-proof, but I have worked at many web-based companies and I know how hard it is to maintain your own servers… and Amazon runs the best around. Using my own S3 account will cost me $9/year ($15 when not on sale) and Amazon will charge me .15 per GB per month, and .10 per GB for upload.

Since I’ve not run the numbers, let’s compare that to Google account shared storage which is $1.7/m ($20/year) for 10 GB, or $20/m ($250/year) for 150 GB. Google seems to only have storage for gmail and photos (picasa).

So if I have 50 or 150 GB of photos (50 is pretty close, I hope), my annual cost would be:
LSB+S3: 50 GB = $9 + (.1*50 + .15*50*12) = 9 + (5+90) = $104
LSB+S3: 150 GB = $9 + (.1*150 + .15*150*12) = 9 + (15+270) = $294
Google: 150 GB = $250

So I’m actually surprised that Google comes in as cheaper in the 150 GB scenario. But there are a few assumptions here. I don’t think I need 150 GB, and with S3 I only get charged what I use, not so with Google. I also get to pay Amazon monthly, instead of having to pay Google upfront each year, so that makes a big impact. And the biggest assumption is that Google only really stores photos, being able to store multiple chunks of data is important to me. So in the end, Google is not as expensive as the sticker-shock felt seeing $250/year, but S3 is a lot more flexible. As I’ve also followed in the tech news, web backup storage companies have all but failed, so even if LifestreamBackup doesn’t make it, my backup will be on Amazon, and if they fail, I will have other worries.

But as with the case with any backup, it has to be easy and automatic, or it won’t get done. I’m not one of those people that is good about doing manual backups, and some of the this stuff (like Facebook), I can’t even backup manually. So I’m going to give this a try for at least a year and see how the fees pile up. I also want to play around with S3 since I think it’s a great platform.

So this post is a bit longer than I was expecting, but 30 minutes after setup and config, my Twitter and Delicious were each took about 1 second each to backup, and I’m still waiting on Flickr and Google Docs.

Their WordPress plugin didn’t work for me, but I got an email back from co-founder Rob May, who is testing a new version of the plugin and said he would be in touch “in a few hours”.

Thanks to Mashable for the heads up.

Will post updates as I learn more.

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