Data Backup Digest

Cloud data is often heralded as more safe and secure than local storage. While most online service providers do take appropriate measures to ensure information is safe and secure, many possible issues could cause data loss, like physical damage to a data center or hacks and other malicious intrusions That’s where Backupify comes in. It’s an online service that back-ups data from other web sites, and makes it easy to search and restore.

Backupify offers three products, each of which back-ups different services. The first is for backing up Google Apps for businesses, such as Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Calendar. The second is a backup of data from Salesforce, a popular online CRM application. The third product is for personal services and social media websites, like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, personal Google accounts, and more.

The Google Apps product was Backupify’s first and has three different price levels. The first two are $3 and $4 per user per month, respectively. Businesses can also choose to pay $990 per month for each domain and avoid the per user cost. All of the levels provide automatic daily back-ups, data export, one-click restore, and a few other features. The $4 tier or $990 offer two additional daily back-ups and a couple of other features that will appeal to business users who need more control. The $990 plan is limited to 1 TB of data, so large businesses may want to choose one of the other plans that have no data cap.

The Salesforce backup product offers only one price tier with a base cost of $50 per month. That plan covers 10 users and each gets 1 GB of storage. Additional users can be added for $5 extra per user. Backupify also makes sure to manage the number of requests it makes to Saleforce to avoid exceeding API access limits. While backing up Salesforce data to another cloud service may sound risky, all of the data is encrypted and stored on Amazon S3, which is known for its 99.9% uptime.

Backupify is mainly meant for businesses but it can be used by a single user. Their personal cloud product is specifically designed for single users who want their online data backed up. This is the only product that has a free tier and it has several limitations that make it unappealing to users with critical information and a number of services to backup. Specifically, data is only backed-up once a week, so it could be stale and days out of date, and only 3 apps can be backed up. The 1 GB storage LIMIT is also very low. The paid plans, one for $4.99 and the other for $19.99, provide daily back-ups, much more space, and work with up to 25 services.

The user experience of Backupify is where it really shines. It has simple and clean front-end that is easy to use. Each user has access to a control panel that clearly shows the backed-up services, the date of the last backup, what services are being backed-up, and the amount of data that has been used. Also, from the control panel users can alter settings and request a zip export. In addition, looking through archives is easy and painless. Users can use a search box or manually navigate saved data. Although no one hopes to ever have to use a product like Backupify to restore deleted data, when the time does come, the process is as easy as can be.