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?
anotherschwab and 
Rob are discussing. 
There is no box 
Rob 9:30 am on April 3, 2010 Permalink |
Hi Andrew,
We can’t replicate this error, and haven’t had a single user complain about anything similar, so you might want to send us an email with some more information so we can look into it.
We’ve seen a weird bug with some versions of IE 7 where it downloads empty zip files that really have data, so you may want to include your browser info.
anotherschwab 1:37 pm on April 3, 2010 Permalink |
Well, the .eml files open fine in mail on my Mac OS X Leopard 10.6.3. Something must be wrong with Outlook Express on my Windows XP machine. They open with no subject and sender unspecified. Of course I don’t use Outlook express, or Outlook being that we’ve moved everything to Google Apps, so restoring could be interesting.
Again, thanks for the response. I’m looking into how we might use Backupify with our students and staff to back up their Google Apps Docs. since there really is no way to do a traditional backup for their cloud stuff.
Rob 10:23 am on April 3, 2010 Permalink |
You also might want to try blogger again. Your backups are there. I think it was some other problem.
anotherschwab 1:29 pm on April 3, 2010 Permalink |
The Blogger service is indeed now working. I can access the account settings and backup archives whereas I could not yesterday from two different machines. It is comforting to know that my unimportant blog entries are being backed up in the cloud and I can now see them in all their backupify glory. Thanks for the follow up.