Backupify Adds Cloud Backup Service, Many Customers

We love what the late, great former columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle Herb Caen used to call NamePhreaks: people or companies whose names are unusually fitting for what they do.

For example, there have been baseball pitchers named Rollie Fingers, Phil Knuckles and Bill Hands. A recent NamePhreak would be Grant Balfour, whom the Oakland A’s just signed. International chef Wolfgang Puck would be a NamePhreak, if only he were a hockey player.

There are NamePhreaks in data storage, as there are in many businesses. We once met a storage admin named William Raid at a Storage Networking World conference. At another event, we were introduced to an IT manager named Russell I. Structure. Don’t know if his middle name was Infra, but we should have asked.

A creative company we came across recently that probably qualifies as a NamePhreak is a cloud-based storage provider called Backupify. The name alone tells its story quite clearly — one would think.

Backupify describes itself as an all-in-one archiving, search and restore service for the popular online services including Google Apps, Facebook, Twitter, Picasa and others.

Anyway, the 3-year-old Cambridge, Mass.-based company made some news Jan. 18 when it announced that during calendar year 2010, as businesses and consumers moved more of their data to the cloud, they realized the need for an independent backup service like the one they provide. Thus, Backupify’s user base grew from 30,000 early in the year to more than 122,000 by December.

Why the sudden surge of growth and assumed profitability? Well, it turns out that the company’s growth was fueled largely by Backupify’s adding backup support for new cloud services.

Strange but true. Backupify didn’t have such a backup feature until 2010, and it’s been in business since 2008. Now it seems to have found its real purpose in life.

The company now claims those 122,000 customers who use its wares to protect 713 million e-mails, 92 million images and 136 million tweets — and counting.

Know any other NamePhreak candidates? E-mail them to us or add in a comment, and we’ll consider for this column. That is all.