Give the site your username and password, and for no pay you can backup once a month up to a certain amount of data. For a tiny fee you can backup monthly. For a bit more, you even get a daily backup of everything. So that when google goes broke or your email user/pw is compromised, you have a backup. OR! Better yet! Backup for free at ANY rate. But if you ever want to retrieve your contact list, or Geni images, pay for them!

To enter the site, besides a onetime user/pw that you give it and that actually works, you supply a series of answers to common questions, or a series of questions you can ask, that you know the answer to. Then to retrieve the backup you must supply that information.
-- pashute, Aug 31 2009

There are plenty of web-based backup services already, but those all back up your hard-drive, not your social life. So, this would be a cross between a backup service and a, uh, personal content aggregator or something. (What _do_ you call a thing that logs into your personal mailboxes/sites for you?)

I think a lot of the users of such a service wouldn't realize that they are backing up the static appearance of services (like archive.org does), but not the service functionality itself.

Sounds like a prescription for lots of custom screen scraping code and some bizdev arrangements.
-- jutta, Aug 31 2009


Although the idea sounds redundant, you get a bun from me. Yahoo has lost 10+ years of e-mail from one of my accounts and still can't retrieve it. (The engineers are looking into the problem, I'm told). True, I could have done this myself, but I did not. I think you may have a niche -- my only concern would be privacy, reselling of your data, etc.
-- cowtamer, Sep 01 2009


Sorry [21Quest]! Its NOT called Mozy. They do online backup of YOUR DISK! Not of my ONLINE content. So they don't do what I'm proposing at all.

[Bigsleep] thanks! It wouldn't be cheaper for the site itself, if the "site itself" closes down, or all of a sudden decides to charge a fee.

Scraping yes, [Jutta], but not all that much... for an email service its probably just an extra simple "forward" of each mail item in the folders, once, and then using a listener service (which always exists for these programs)
-- pashute, Sep 02 2009



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