snctlnSoftware

Backupify scares me now

So I have heard of the service offered at backupify.com, free backup of gmail, google docs, and a whole slew of online services.  I would definitely like to be able to use this service, but after my first night I am now very cautious of it.

I opted for gmail backup, it is listed as “beta” on their site and there is even a little link to an article of theirs explaining that they had problems with gmail previously but that it has all been cleared up.  So I signed up and went to bed with a warm fuzzy feeling thinking that all of my emails from 6 years of gmail would be backed up finally.

Well that warm fuzzy feeling drastically ended when I woke up this morning.  My Nexus One had an error dialog up telling me that my google account username and password was incorrect.  As a person that pretty much relies on Google for the majority of my business and personal life online this was extremely alarming.  I attempted to log into gmail from my laptop as soon as I could and I was prompted with a screen informing me that my account had been flagged for suspicious activity and that I had to set a new password in order to clear my account.  I obviously changed my password and updated all of my android phones with the new data and things were back to normal.

This was an easy enough problem to take care of, but for those 5 minutes of not knowing what had happened and thinking the worst (maybe my account was hacked) it was just a very unpleasant experience overall.

I look forward to the day when gmail backup can be easy and automated, but for now I have canceled the gmail backup from backupify until it leave beta.  I guess I just want to put my experience out there for any Android developers that have thought about the service.