Triune Designs Blog: Web Design, Development, & Marketing

A while ago, I wrote about backing up your data that is stored on the web. Then, a few days ago I came across a blog post on Beacon Hill NW that was talking about Twitter and the fail whale. As sometimes happens, Jim was having trouble with Twitter. A good discussion arose asking the question: “what do you do if Twitter fails for good?”

Be Ready For That Day
While I do not believe Twitter will be shutting down any time soon, I do believe it is good to be prepared for the future. A case in point: AOL has recently been shutting down a couple of its services. About five years ago, who would have thought AOL would be struggling like it currently is? So, here are a few suggestions on how you can back up your Twitter data.

Tweetake
Tweetake is simple.

1. Enter your Twitter name and password.
2. Choose what you want to back up. Your six options are followers, friends, favorites, your tweets, direct messages, everything.
3. Click “get ‘em.”
4. Wait about 20 to 30 seconds (or more for you power-Twitter users)
5. Download the supplied CSV file.

That’s it. You now have backed up your Twitter account.

I am a bit leery of giving my login information to anyone. So, whenever I use this service I temporarily change my password, use Tweetake, and then change my password back. You can never be too safe and this way I know my information stays with me.

Thanks to The World Wide Web Blog for recommending the Tweetake tool. It was one of the sites that helped convince me that Tweetake is a reputable service and worthy of consideration.

The Manual Method
If you are not trusting or daring enough to give out your user name and password, then here is a manual method for backing up your followers and friends. Thanks to Tweetcrunch for teaching me this technique.

1. Put http://twitter.com/statuses/followers.xml in your address bar of your browser
2. Save this page in your browser and read it as an XML file, with for example excel. If you have a lot of followers then use http://twitter.com/statuses/followers.xml?page=2 and so on.
3. For your friends use the same process with this link http://twitter.com/statuses/friends.xml

Reference to backing up your Twitter information.

Hopefully, these methods will give you a good idea of how to back up your Twitter data and prevent the cloud from keeping it.

Before continuing, I will give you fair warning: this story is not for the faint of heart. This story is full of anguish, tears, and loss… loss of data that is.

A couple of prominent web services have completely lost their data over the past few months and I mean everything!

Ma.gnolia
According to SitePoint’s podcast, Ma.gnolia, a social bookmarking site similar to Delicious lost their entire database. Every single person who kept their bookmarks on this website lost everything and will now have to rebuild their store of website bookmarks.

Journalspace
I also heard on SitePoint’s podcast that Journalspace, a blogging platform similar to WordPress(.com), lost all of their data. This means that every single member of Journalspace lost every single blog post. As any blog author knows, that is devastating!

Why & What You Can Do
Why did this happen? These websites did not back up their data properly. As a result, if the information was deleted on one (or two servers) then everything was erased. This is exactly what occurred in both of the aforementioned examples.

When it comes to your data (i.e. blog posts, personal photos, important documents, videos of the children) do not trust anything. Regularly back it up in multiple places.

Here is an example of how I back up this blog. I schedule automatic backups using an easy WordPress plugin called wp-db-backup. I save that back-up file to the computer in my office and then also back-up the entire drive to another location. With your data always err on the side of caution.

Do Not Be the Chalkboard
Essentially, if you do not back up your information, your data is no more than words on a chalkboard. All it takes is for someone (or something) to come by and wipe it clean and you have lost everything.

The chalkboard photo is courtesy of House Of Sims at Flickr.