Browsing through my feedreader today, I came across a service known as Backupify which uses Amazons cloud service to store the backup data. Much if not all of the data that we send to Twitter, Facebook, and other social outlets does not exist on our own machines. Depending on how you feel about that data, it could be a big loss to see it all of a sudden disappear. One of the services that Backupify is aiming to support is WordPress.
Registering a new account is simple and gives you 1 Gigabyte of data. After registering, you’ll need to click on the Manage link for WordPress under Services In Beta. This will initiate the backup process. However, you’ll need to install the WordPress Backupify plugin before you can proceed.
After the plugin is installed and activated, you’ll have to visit the plugins settings page and initialize the plugin to the Backupify service. You can also take this time to configure the backup option. Notice how I said option. That’s because the only option you can configure from within the plugin is the ability to exclude comments. The full backup area provides a button where you can backup the site locally. The question is, what is backed up? The database of course.
For some reason after I ran the backup locally, the process became stuck at 99%. The status within the browser window said Done so nothing was ongoing. When trying to refresh, I received a warning that my backup would fail if I reloaded the page but after waiting for 5 minutes, I went through with the page refresh.
I have no idea what happened to 99% of the database that was backed up. After refreshing the page, I gave the full backup another try and the same thing happened. It’s supposed to reach 100% and then save the file to my desktop as a third copy. I’ll troubleshoot this more and report on my findings in part 2 of the review.
Speaking of Part 2, that will be published in the next day or two as the backup system is performed automatically and the backups do not show in the archive until 24-48 hours after it’s complete. Speaking of things happening automatically, the process of installing and configuring this plugin has confused me. I’m used to clicking boxes or selecting options but this plugin does not really have any of that. The Backupify website is also sparse with options because everything is performed automatically. The only thing I can really configure on the website is managing accounts and selecting when backups should occur and how I should be emailed.
Backupify is a free service for up to 1 Gig of data so if you give it a try this evening or in the next few days, let me know in the comments if the 99% local backup problem happens for you.
Did I miss something? While Backupify does offer backups for tons of other social media / networking sites, I’m not sure it does quite as good a job as something like http://www.wordpressbackup.org/ because as far as I can tell, it’s only backing up the database, but none of the other important things like the media, plugins etc. WordPressBackup backs up the Entire site.
Still, Backupify handling other things like tweets, delicious, google docs IS pretty cool!