Backupify Raises $900K; TechCrunch Readers Confused

A year after Backupify first started backing up Twitter Tweets, Facebook profiles, and Flickr albums to the cloud, the company raised a $900K round of venture capital funding from a couple of angel investors and venture capital firms General Catalyst and First Round Capital. The company plans to use the expansion capital for ongoing product development and growing its user base.

According to Charlie O’Donnell of First Round Capital, the idea behind Backupify is to provide users of web services and social media sites a single place to back up their cloud data. That single place is Amazon’s S3 servers. Backupify will take your data on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, WordPress, Blogger, YouTube and Google Docs and send it to S3. If one of these services loses your data or you accidentally delete it, Backupify will send you a downloadable PDF with your Tweets or your Facebook profile, for instance. The company offers users up to 1 GB of free storage, and plans to charge users $5/month for up to 10 GB of storage. Essentially, Backupify will be a middleman between social media services and Amazon’s cloud storage.

Like many other TechCrunch commenters, I was completely nonplussed after reading the announcement. To start, most of the data that resides on Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter is of relatively low value, and much of it comes from and is already “backed up” on our desktops. Further, many of the web services whose data Backupify will back up to Amazon’s S3 are already using S3. The fact that Amazon already backs up all of the data residing on its S3 servers makes Backupify completely redundant for web services already using S3 for storage. Further, the reliability of web services not using Amazon’s S3 (such as Facebook) are usually as good, if not better than S3’s. Also, law requires that web services companies such as Facebook retain user data for a few years, even after “deletion.” If you somehow wind up accidentally deleting Facebook data that is somehow valuable and not already on your desktop, you can contact Facebook to get it back. While I’m sure Backupify could get my Facebook profile and wall comments back to me faster, they would be in PDF form. How is that useful?

I would probably never use Backupify even if it was free for unlimited data, and any combination of the reasons above make it hard for me to see this company building a large user base. Perhaps there is a market here for corporate customers that need to back up their Facebook and Twitter data for compliance purposes. But if there really is, Facebook and Twitter would probably roll out their own solutions and capitalize on the opportunity.