Startup Claims Storage of 2 Million 'Tweets' Per Day

It is now possible to back up information you have saved in cloud services—such as e-mail and Twitter dispatches—in the cloud itself.

BackupMy.net, a year-old Austin, Texas, startup, began offering free backup of Twitter messages on BackupMyTweets.com back in February 2009 and now claims to be storing an average of nearly 2 million "tweets" daily, CEO and founder Josh Baer told eWEEK.

"Think about it: More and more of what you do now is in the cloud, and more and more of what you're going to be doing will be in the cloud," Baer told eWEEK. "You can back up what you have on your PC, but you don't have a backup of most of the stuff you have in the cloud."

Baer is a self-described "serial entrepreneur" who started his first application service provider (ASP) company, an online e-mail marketing company, in 1999. He and a friend, Damon Cali, make up the staff at BackupMy.net now, but they expect to be expanding as their services work their way into the online culture.

"Our first product to launch was BackupMyMail, which backs up Gmail, Hotmail, IMAP and POP accounts [with more coming]," Baer said. "We then launched BackupMyTweets, which is obviously a Twitter backup system. We're working on more, including BackupMyBlog, BackupMyPics and several others. All of our products will be available to users via a single, simple dashboard.

"BackupMyPics could be used for Flickr and Picasa, and maybe even Facebook. All of our products are Web applications built on cloud infrastructure."

Why use a cloud backup for data stored in ostensibly safe cloud havens, such as Google, Amazon or Flickr?

The likelihood of a service like Google losing e-mail is pretty low, Baer admitted.

"But it is plausible that they could suspend use of my [Gmail] account because of suspected abuse or something, even if I didn't do anything; that happens to people. Somebody could get my access information and delete my e-mail or pictures. Or maybe I just accidentally delete a lot of stuff," Baer said.

So there are a lot of good reasons to back up e-mail, photos, "tweets" and other documents that are stored someplace other than your own desktop, laptop or handheld device, Baer said.

"BackupMyMail is a simple, automatic system to back up your online e-mail account. There is no software to install or configure—just tell us what accounts to back up and we'll handle the rest," Baer said.

"You'll get daily snapshots of your account that you can download if the unthinkable happens, or if you just delete an important message by accident. BackupMyMail uses open standards so that you maintain control of your data."

Next: How BackupMy.net Makes Money >>