If you have stored documents on Google Docs, you can use the built-in export feature of Google Docs to save all your documents on to the hard drive with a simple click.
Photo sharing sites like Flickr and Facebook will only let you download one photo at a time but there are third-party utilities (like FlickrDown and FotoBounce) that you may use to download all the pictures to the local drive in bulk.
The Problem
You can find similar solutions /workarounds for backing up your online data that may be residing on Twitter, Gmail, WordPress, PhotoBucket and other cloud based services.
There’re however some drawbacks with most of these “backup” solutions. First, they are all manual workarounds so you have to initiate the backup process on your own (in an ideal situation, backups should be automated). The other problem is that none of these solutions offer incremental backups (you will only want to download files from the cloud that are either new or have changed since the last backup).
The Solution
If you are looking for a simple solution that will let you backup all your online data to a central place effortlessly, check out Backify.com – this an online service that will fetch your documents, tweets, blogs, pictures, etc. from all your online accounts and will store them to Amazon S3, another cloud based storage service. Alternatively, you may also download these files to your local computer straight from Backify.
Backify works like this – you first need to associate all your different online accounts to Backify and then backups will occur automatically at frequent intervals. If you are techie, think of Backify as a web-based cron job for performing daily backups of your online accounts. It supports Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Wordpress, Blogger, Flickr, and most other popular online services.
Get Backify for Free
Backify is a commercial service and you’ll have to pay around $4/month for 2GB of storage or $5/month for a premium account that offers 10 GB of online storage space. However, the good news is that if you sign-up before January 31st, the monthly fee will be waived and you can enjoy Backify services for free.
The Backify site currently makes no mention of any limitations for free accounts but there will probably be some, at least on the storage front.
Use Your Own Amazon Account with Backify
As mentioned above, Backify uses the reliable Amazon S3 service to backup your online accounts. Alternatively, you may choose the S3 option during the sign-up process, supply your Amazon Access keys and Backify will then store your acconts data in one of your S3 buckets instead of their own.
This is useful because you can then access these files directly from the desktop using any of the S3 clients without having to use the web interface of Backify.