Do you have precious content on Google Docs or Flickr or some other cloud service?
Back it up locally. Now!
There’s a flurry of activity regarding the death of tr.im, a popular URL shortener service that wasn’t able to enter into a path of self sustainability.
The losers, as usual, are its users.
The fact is we’ve become too used to having reliable, free web applications. The truth is that these companies are, in most cases, launched first to see if they grab an audience, and then try to make a business model to continue sustaining their operations. Louis Gray has a great post about the cycles that these companies go through.
Please, learn this golden rule: if you are not paying for it, it might be gone tomorrow.
The next time, before you put any precious content on one of these “alpha” or “beta” services, ask the developer how you can backup the content you will be putting in it. If they don’t know (or answer) then it’s probably better not to use them at all.
The best approach, however, is to always have a Plan “B”. The “B” here stands for Backup.
Thomas Hawk is reporting that some Flickr users had their accounts terminated without any warning. See that as the wakeup call of what would happen if all your photos disappeared one day and you had no backup of them.
My friend Aden over at FriendFeed went through a similar scare, when a large amount of her writings disappeared after startup QuillPill went down (BTW, Crunchbase, you should put them on the Dead Pool already).
Was the demise of tr.im really necessary? I believe we should start asking developers to charge for their services, so that in exchange we can demand a reliable service. If enough people had found it useful and demanded tr.im to charge them, we could start showing that us, as users, are ready to pay for good services.
I will ask all from all of you to suggest (via comments) services or applications that allow you to store popular sites locally.
For now, please think about this and come up with backup workflow. You’ll be glad you did as soon as the next cloud app goes down, taking your content down with it.
Photo by indoloony
Update: Gina Trapani put together a list of free tools to backup your online accounts.
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