How to backup your Facebook Page

I started this Facebook Page back in April and I’ve accumulated quite a lot of posts, comments, messages, and photos.  I would be devastated if anything happened to all that data.  Yet that could happen - a hacker, an error on my part, or a virus, or even sabotage, could result in the loss of some, or all, of my Facebook page (and yours too!).

Facebook allows you to download a copy of your personal Facebook data so that you always have a copy in case something happens to Facebook.   But they don’t offer the same for Pages.    

Luckily there is a way you can back up your Facebook Page so that if the worst did happen you could restore it. 

Backupify allows you to backup cloud-based data, that includes Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, LinkedIn, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Flickr, Blogger, Picasa, and Zoho.  I hadn’t really thought about all the cloud-based services I use before, but looking at that list, I have a Gmail account; I use Blogger for my Techie Mum blog; I use Picasa for photo editing and creating collages; Google Docs for adding documents to my Blog for my students to access; LinkedIn for my business profile, and of course, Facebook and Twitter.  That’s a lot of data I could lose if something happened to those apps.

So, I did a bit of backing up with Backupify last night, and it was so easy.  I’ll run you through the steps of backing up a Facebook Page, but the process is the same for whichever app you choose.

1    Go to www.backupify.com and click on the link for Backupify for Personal Apps

2    Choose which level of backup you need – more about the different accounts below.

3    Choose the accounts you want to protect.

4    Once I clicked on Facebook Fanpage I was asked to click on the Login link to go to my Facebook account

5    On Facebook I had to ‘Allow’ Backupify to access my account so that it can backup my Page.

6   Back to Backupify to choose which Page to backup

7   Click on Continue configuration and you then choose what you want backed up from your Facebook Page.  I had no idea how many different spots on Facebook are all linked to my Techie Mum Page – there’s 30 different options you can choose to be backed up – as well as posts, there’s photos, events, groups, notes, comments, statuses, and more.  I just chose everything, then clicked on Save Configuration.

8    Backupify starts the first backup immediately.

9    To add another cloud based account, click on Add Service.

That’s the basic set up, and for each personal app you select you’ll go through a similar process – select the app, login to give Backupify approval to access your account for backing up – select what you want backed up.

If the worst happened and your accounts were lost or damaged, restoring them from Backupify is either a one click restore, or a quick download to your computer, depending on the individual application.

How much does it cost? 

Backupify is free for cloud based accounts, with a 1GB storage limit.  The free account will back up your chosen accounts once each week.

If you want to backup more accounts there are two other plans available:

$4.99 per month covers five accounts with a 10GB limit and backs up nightly.

$19.99 per month covers 25 accounts with a 50GB limit and backs up nightly.

  

Is it safe? 

Backupify uses Amazon’s Web Services and all data is transferred over encrypted channels.  But one of the ways I like to check up on something I’m about to use is to check who their backers are – who has invested money in them.  In the case of Backupify, one of its latest investors is Symantec – that’s the company that brings you the Norton Internet Security products.  So, if Symantec, who are all about security, considers Backupify a good bet, then I’ll give them a go.

It only took a few minutes to set up Backupify and it does give me peace of mind knowing that if something did happen to all my cloud-based data it isn’t lost forever.