Social Network Backups

This article is part 1 of a series of Quite Useful articles on backups.

I saw Blaine Cook and Joe Stump give a talk at The Future of Web Apps last year, in which Joe said “… and lo and behold you guys like to make a lot of crap!”  It’s true, we do like to make crap.  The problem for us comes when we want to save that crap or back it up.

Most social networks have APIs, which means it’s easy for programmers to access them and extract data.  There’s also more accessible ways to get hold of your data.

Back up Twitter

Desktop clients like TweetDeck download your messages, so obviously you can use them as a backup to a limited extent.  There are web applications that specifically back up Twitter as well.

A popular one is Tweetake.  It requires your Twitter password, but can backup direct messages as well as your tweets and contact list.  TwitterSafe is a similar solution.

Back up Flickr

There’s loads of uploaders for Flickr, but what about backup solutions?  Whilst there are programs that let you download sets of files, there aren’t that many which specifically include a backup solution: i.e., something that will download photos since you last backed up (this is known as an incremental backup).

FlickrEdit includes a backup feature.  It will run in Windows or Mac OS.  I’ve used it a few times for downloading batches of Flickr photos, and it seems reliable enough.

FlickrEdit is fairly easy to use.  Sometimes I had to click “refresh” when I expected it to load things automatically, but it gets the job done.  It’ll also backup your contacts photos and favourites.

Flickry and PhotoGrabbr are two other Flickr management tools for Mac OS.  They don’t back up photos specifically, but they’re quick to install and use so they’re useful if you just want a quick offline copy.

Back up Facebook

AddressBookSync downloads Facebook profile photos and other contact information to your Mac’s Address Book.  It can also add new contact data, so you could use it to grab contacts before leaving Facebook, or just to back that data up.

EventBox downloads (small) photos and status updates from Facebook (as well as tweets and direct messages from Twitter), so you could use it as an offline repository of social network data.

PhotoBook for Mac OS lets you add Facebook photos to iPhoto.

Back up Delicious

Delicious specifically supports backups on the Settings, Export page.

Pukka is an easy to use Mac OS app that downloads your bookmarks.

LifeHacker had this tip on how to download Delicious bookmarks with curl: Backup Delicious Bookmarks From The Shell.