As users spend more time socializing online, a new need is emerging: backing up our 
social selves. Let’s face it, data loss is a reality, and just because your digital assets are in the hands of huge corporations doesn’t mean things can’t go wrong for them either. Further, as we’ve examined in the past, since there are few laws governing policies of online companies, they literally can change their policies overnight. Facebook, for example, made a massive switch by defaulting data to the public view instead of the private one. What if your blog hosting provider changes terms, or goes out of business? What if Facebook decides to stop hosting all of your photos? It’s time to think about a digital asset backup plan.
Much like data on our computers is backed up in the cloud or in an external hard drives, new services and features are springing up that back up your social media data. Facebook recently announced a “download your data” feature as part of their site redesign. Quoting from the official Facebook blog:
First, we’ve built an easy way to quickly download to your computer everything you’ve ever posted on Facebook and all your correspondences with friends: your messages, Wall posts, photos, status updates and profile information.
If you want a copy of the information you’ve put on Facebook for any reason, you can click a link and easily get a copy of all of it in a single download. To protect your information, this feature is only available after confirming your password and answering appropriate security questions.
Facebook isn’t the only company concerned with backing up digital assets. Inc. recently published an article entitled “How To Back Up Your Social Media Accounts.”
But while the data you upload and share is inherently personal to you and your network, you don’t actually own the information. It all lives on the “cloud,” and if any of those services were to crash, you could lose everything you’ve ever contributed to the communities. That is why backing up your social data is just as important as backing up the hard drive of your computer.
Several services are covered that allow users to save backup copies of their online socializing, including Backupify and SocialSafe. The first is a cloud based solution while the second gives users copies of their data downloaded to their hard disks. We’re not (yet) recommending any particular solution over any other, so take a look around and let us know which solutions are the best for you. We recommend backing up all of your digital assets, either in the cloud or on your hard disk (or both). As your digital assets become more and more a part of your real life, it’s important to think of the longevity and ability to preserve them.
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