Well that doesn’t make any sense…By law the companies he mentions have to hold onto their user data for a certain period of time anyway, usually a few years, so why would you need another service to do this? For instance, when you delete something on facebook, or even if you delete your account — by law it has to be backed up for a few years…so you aren’t really deleting anything. Same goes for YouTube, Gmail, Twitter, etc.

Hi Jeff,
The legal issue is more about ease of getting that data. If you want to contact Gmail and Facebook and see how easy it is to get old records, I’m happy to race you using Backupify.

But more than that, it isn’t that our users think those companies will lose their data, their are hacking, SLA, and other issues. We get regular emails from users who accidentally deleted a few emails from Gmail and need them back.

The service has got a huge potential audience, so I kind of feel that $900K is less, it would have grown faster if it would have got higher funds.

A bit trigger happy uh?

its probably just me, but if my facebook say got maliciously hacked and all the stuff was deleated, i really couldnt be bothered to refriend everyone and re join all my groups and re fill in my profile.

id rather just wait for facebook to pull their finger out.

but then im lazy.

horrible company name

iffy at best

Hi Will,
What if that restore could be automated?
Rob

All this snow and it’s got to flow somewhere. I just got in and DC is a mess. They can’t haul snow like NYC can. This snow will melt and hit rivers and then the river sports will really have great seasons this year. Atlanta is still in a drought and the local Ocoee River has plenty of water behind it’s dam for Ocoee Rafting.

What good does a PDF do me? Assuming my facebook data is so important to me that I would desire to restore my profile (it isn’t), I certainly wouldn’t go through a PDF to do so. At the very least this should make use of the API’s (not sure it’s possible) to restore the data.

Assuming there’s a market for this (for corporate customers apparently) I think this company would face significant difficulty if FB, Twitter, GMail et al. decide to capitalize on that and roll out their own back-up solution for paying clients.

TechCrunch did you delete my comment or somehow lose it? It was up not it’s gone.

And now it’s back. Nvm. Weird.

Congrats to Rob on this announcement. Really excited about the potential for this service.

I’ve been using Backupify for about 3 months, and I love the security of knowing that all the effort I put into my blog, facebook, twitter and flickr accounts is protected. It’s an amazing bargain at that price.

Man, investors are easily duped. Backup my facebook? Are you kidding? let me remind you of something… everything on facebook CAME FROM MY COMPUTER! Are there actually users who would pay to backup the data they generate on free social services?

The services this thing aims to backup already offer almost unlimited storage. I barely care to delete emails from my Gmail for example.

Also isn’t that why we are using more of the cloud – coz its unlimited storage and safe?

Now if you’re as careful to even bother deleting stuff, then i guess you won’t delete the wrong things. But if you do THEN this could be handy.

What’s wrong with staying in Louisville, Kentucky?

For many users (myself included), much of the data that resides on Facebook never really came from their computers — it was created *on* Facebook. A simple example is Facebook status updates. Most users write the status update on Facebook.com or use a third-party client. But, that content never really gets stored on the user’s computer.

it’s not so much about storage as it is, it’s about having multiple copies for compliance reasons.

I’ve worked at a couple of finance firms where the two biggest reasons for not moving to “the cloud” was security and compliance. Absolutely everything was backed up multiple times, one place I worked had a dedicated hardline to another building 150km away that kept a backup of everything on a <10 minute lag (in that if the entire building was shot by a giant laser from space, they could just hire more monkey's to start work in the other office and have lost only the past 10 minutes of stuff).

We had less than 200 staff too. $10,000 a year to make sure everything we did online was backed up without hassle? Yes please.

i agree that this service seems rather “dumb” to be nice haha. do people out there really care that much about losing their facebook or even twitter info? like myself, im sure that most users would probably just delete their accounts if any of their info was lost cause these services are just a fad for now and is something to keep either the unemployed busy, boredom at work or give lonely housewives something to do. Also, it is weird that someone like jason calacanis would even invest in a company like this when he has personally said that it is stupid to build a company on top of another companys business model cause as soon as that company fails what is there to do besides fail.

Backupify is soon enough going to fail.

haha, i couldnt agree more. it isnt lazy, it is just practical. most users just expect things to work and if they dont, why in the hell would i go out of my way to pay for a service that should already be included with these companies at no charge?

agreed. exactly why i said that jason calacanis (whom i love and respect) seems rather hypocritical when he said he would never invest in a company that survives solely off other companies. BECAUSE THEY CAN INTEGRATE ONE OF THEIR OWN ON THEIR OWN.

haha, now i know you are getting desperate when you say that your business relys on the ability to backup status updates with idiots saying “going out with the boys to get some beers at california pizza kitchen” haha. now i know this company truly is a joke.

have you been to kentucky before?

I don’t like how i can’t find what prices they charge beyond their free 1GB service easily on their website.

This site is great for people who take their facebook/twitter/etc. serious..but I really don’t care.

why would anyone go to kentucky besides to see the colonel haha bad joke i know but really

I’m going to code a service to backup Backupify, and we’ll backup ourselves 5 times to different cloud storage services, it’s going to be huge! Plus we’ll back it up to paper and mail you copies each month!

people really take their facebook and twitter seriously? wow, news to me haha.

haha, now that is a service that i would pay for. can the paper be done on carbon copy paper?

will,
You might find it interesting that FINRA is mandating that people who use Facebook or Twitter for business are required to backup/archive their social media activities for compliance purposes. http://www.finra.org/Industry/Education/OnlineLearning/Webinars/P119385

Hi Chase,
IWhile Twitter backup may seem trite, what about businesses moving from Quickbooks to Quickbooks Online, do you think they would want an independent backup of their data? Or is the move to Quickbooks Online a fad too?

Cheers,
Rob

Hi Ryan,
You would be surprised that one of our top requests is to add another cloud (like Rackspace) so people can have dual backups.

Rob

well, if that is the case then why would any idiot pay for something that finra is mandating facebook and twitter to do in the first place. there really is no relevant use for backupify.

it reminds me of the movie industry. the main reason they release crappy movies is because they know they are crappy so they use it as a insurance and tax write off.

i think that the investment in backupify is solely for a insurance / tax write off.

Hi Todd,
We haven’t set the prices yet. Consumer may be free forever. We won’t know until we do some testing.

Rob

i am more than positive that a company like quickbooks that deals with peoples finances will have a backup system of there own and wouldnt want a third party to have access to that information. nice try though

Rob, my biggest request at the moment is that you have a backup business idea because backupify is just terrible.

Hi Chris,
If you could read my email, the CTO requests that we back stuff up, the requests for archiving/compliance of all this SaaS, you may change your mind. Look at the long term vision. Your data is moving to the cloud, and the entire ecosystem we have around PCs has to be replicated in the cloud. Much much work to be done. It’s not really about backup. It’s about data liberation. That’s all I can say without giving too much away right now.

Cheers,
Rob

Chase,
It’s not about the backup, it’s about control of your own data. With Quickbooks on a PC, you have access to your data, with Quickbooks online, you don’t. What if you unknowingly violate a SLA? What if you get hacked, or delete something, and Quickbooks backups get overwritten with your bad data? It happened to me. I had a Joomla site with a prominent hosting company. We got hacked. The company had a backup. Their I.T. guy didn’t overwrite our site with the backup, he overwrote the backup with our hacked site. We lost all that data forever, and it was the hosting company’s fault.

Remember when your phone number was tied to a phone carrier and you couldn’t take it with you? It sucked. Making numbers mobile improved the phone industry. Making data portable will do the same for SaaS.

Cheers,
Rob

Hi Will,
Thanks for your comment below. You blew our cover, so we decided to come clean. We now have a new tagline for our site. “Backupify: The Easy Way to Get and Insurance or Tax Write Off”. .

Cheers,
Rob

Rob-

Then you guys could add that onto your feature list: “tagline” backup for websites too?

You guys are missing the point. You complain too much. They are funded by smart VCs.

Rob: If you don’t mind…approximately how much did you give up for $125,000 and $900,000?

and if you put peanut butter on your balls, im sure you can find a dog to lick it too.

If it’s not about backup, shouldn’t you change the name then?

For once, I would like to see smart people solve challenging and/or real problems, not pseudo “problems” about liberating/backupifying people’s social media networking presence.

agreed :-)

datafy or liberatify maybe?

maybe you should buy itoldyouso.com it could be a backup solution for founders of crappy ideas to backup comments left by users who told you so that your idea is crap? or itoldyousoify.com maybe?

Hi Vin,
Do you include SaaS tools that businesses use for CRM, Accounting, HR, etc. in your analysis that these are frivolous pseudo problems?

It’s interesting that you see this as pertaining only to social media. Our investors instantly saw a much bigger picture. As soon as I said we backup Twitter, they realize it’s not about Twitter at all, but about all your data moving to the cloud and the need for an entirely new set of tools, tools that Backupify is well positioned to build.

Keep in mind that you are commenting on a blog, a medium that was lambasted just a few years ago as amateur trash, a solution in search of a problem, noise, and all sorts of similar other slams.

My point is that, perhaps if you could think a bit bigger, you would be the subject of a Techcrunch post instead of just leaving weakly formed comments on posts about things you claim not to even like.

Cheers,
Rob

We never kiss and tell Victor. It’s one of the rules of the game.

Hi Jorge,
It would be better to use it to backup the negative comments from VCs, which are much more interesting. Even the guys who invested in us grilled us with great questions and pointed out issues and problems that were much better than the quickfire criticisms we see here.

We love criticism as Backupify, we are just usually disappointed in the quality of it. I expected Techcrunch readers to hit on some of the deeper issues here, the things that really are a concern. It would have made the discussion much more interesting. But I suppose one liners about dogs and peanut butter are the best we get today.

Cheers,
Rob

@will, I think you may have misunderstood the FINRA requirements. FINRA can’t mandate that twitter/facebook/etc have to have a backup service, and they’re not. They can mandate that certain companies have to backup the info they put on facebook. Thus where backupify fits in. While the guy going to the pub doesn’t want to remember, facebook.com/cocacola could contain information that may be relevant to a court case in the future easily enough.

95%+ of facebook users probably won’t give a toss about backupify, and that’s generally fine for any company. You don’t need to get $50 a year off every user to make money (if you could, you’d make about $20b a year though, which would be fairly awesome). Hit up even 1% of 1% of them (so 99.99% of them don’t need to give a toss) and you’re looking at $2m revenue a year, not bad.

Plus tax writeoffs involve you actually earning money in the first place. Businesses could expense the cost of any backup service, but there’s no business tax writeoff in the world that gives you more money back than what you spent on it (except maybe being unemployed). Even Uwe Boll movies make money, the thing is if they don’t then the German government lets you write off 100% of your losses (meaning you get about 50% of it back), so the risk is lessened.

Rob,

Congrats on the deal and the Crunch.

Jeremy – Louisville

Rob – As a fellow entrepreneur, I want to first of all offer a belated congratulations on your completion of a round of funding. This is a commendable accomplishment, especially given that your investors are quite savvy and credible.

As I was reading the comments to this post, I found myself growing increasingly irritated by the gratuitous negativity directed at you/Backupify. Frankly, like you, I would have expected higher-quality feedback from the TechCrunch audience.

Thoughtful, constructive criticism is helpful, and I'm sure you would welcome it. But some of the negatively-charged, discouraging comments in this thread are repulsive.

As you know, there will always be naysayers who get satisfaction from disparaging the efforts, ideas, and accomplishments of others. (In my experience, these naysayers are not generally inspiring leaders or the builders of highly successful companies.) I hope that you remain undeterred by the negativity in some of these comments, and I wish you all the best with your venture!