Restorify

After my glowing review of Backupify last week, I’m ashamed to admit that I forgot the golden rule of backups, if you can’t restore, then you haven’t successfully backed up anything. In checking some of the services besides twitter in my Backupify cloud backup account yesterday, I noticed that while I’ve been receiving nice emails about successful Gmail backups, when I went to restore my email (one at a time) all I got were empty .eml files. (Don’t get me started on that format either, seriously I need an email client to read restored gmail email?). This appears to be a problem with the backupify gmail service, which is still in beta after all.  But beta or not, I don’t think it should be cheerfully telling me that my email is backed up if I can’t restore it at all.

Now, formats aside, my Hotmail backup actually works. And yes, I have a hotmail account, have since before there was dirt and I am kind of partial to it. It was my first web based email and I still remember having to use pine at University too, so there.

The twitter backup is still awesome, although threaded conversations would be nice.  Google Docs works as advertised, although again the format is all in Microsoft Office docs. It looks like they simply do an export as Office documents to their cloud. While I would prefer a zip archive option, this will work as protection against the accidental delete. My blogger backup currently says “Application Error” when I try and look at the Archive. I guess if anything happens to my Andrew T. Schwab blog I’m SOL.  But hey, its free and still in Beta so I really shouldn’t complain.

Oh, and Backupify does work with Google Apps, I have it backing up one of my Standard Apps Gmail accounts.  So I’m an idiot, what else is new?  Now, where’d I put that iPad?