ReadWriteWeb

A new service announced today gives companies and other organizations the ability to create a searchable, fully functional archive of their Websites, blogs, social media accounts and RSS feeds.

Reed Technology Web Archiving Services, promises to create an interactive archive of a company's entire Web presence, something that is often recommend for legal purposes.

As someone without a technical background, I'm often skeptical of promises like "one-button setup" and "installs in 2 minutes." Just because it's easy or obvious for the developer, doesn't mean it's easy for the end-user. "Turnkey" isn't always "turnkey."

But TurnKey Linux promise that the new backup and migration tool it's built - aptly titled TKLBAM - isn't hyperbole. Here's the pitch: "We designed "TurnKey Backup and Migration" (which we're open sourcing BTW), to be our ideal backup system. Imagine a fully automated backup and restore system with no pain. That you wouldn't need to configure. That just magically knows what to backup and, just as importantly, what NOT to backup, to create super efficient, encrypted backups of changes to files, databases, package management state, even users and groups."

Users of desktop-to-cloud synchronization service Nomadesk can now edit files in the cloud with Zoho. Nomadesk users can right-click on a document, spreadsheet or presentation on the web-based Nomadesk dashboard and click "edit" to open the file in Zoho. Changes are then synchronized to the user's desktop.

Cloud computing means many things, but almost all definitions include some key value propositions: scalable on-demand resources, a metered pay-per-use model, access over the Internet, and infrastructure management and optimization that is better than most data centers.

At a more conceptual level, cloud computing abstracts away all the undifferentiated IT tasks. Most businesses don't add any value to their customers or create any competitive advantage for themselves when they buy, build, configure, and manage servers and storage. This is doubly true for disaster recovery equipment and data centers.

One lesson the devastating earthquake in Haiti has taught us is that natural disasters can cause billions of dollars in damage anywhere in the world almost instantaneously. If an earthquake of that magnitude were to hit a tech-centric city like San Francisco, millions of computer files would likely be lost in the destruction.

Natural disasters, house fires and hard drive failures are exactly the futile situations for which backup services like Carbonite exist. Carbonite has been providing consumer level backup since its foudning 2006, and now the company is offering competitively priced solutions for small businesses.

SocialSafe, the Facebook backup tool that launched earlier this summer, has now added a new feature that allows you to back up your Facebook Wall Posts using the company's desktop application. The $2.99 program runs using Adobe AIR and accesses your account via Facebook Connect functionality. Once logged in, you can download nearly everything posted to Facebook, from photos to your profile and more.

Are you backing up your Google Docs? If not, it's better to be safe than sorry, especially when it comes to the cloud. For customers of the enterprise and education versions of the document software as a service, LTech's new tool lets administrators do comprehensive or selective backups.

There have been options before to backup your Docs, but LTech seems to be the first official enterprise partner of Google to offer such a software package. Currently there's a single user demo available for free, with an enterprise license for the domain version (of Apps).

The weekend is the perfect time to get started on computer projects that you just didn't have time for during the week. This weekend, my project of choice is backups. Although I can safely say that the majority of my files are (relatively) safe in the cloud, it never hurts to make a run through and upload those that got overlooked.

My documents are spread out across Google Docs, Office Live, SkyDrive, and Box.net. My photos are on flickr and Facebook. My music and video collections are backed up locally to multiple external drives (since I'm too cheap to pay for the hundreds of gigs of online storage needed), but one thing that wasn't backed up anywhere but on my own PC was the thing that may be the most important of all: my iPhone.

Anyone who has ever crashed a computer without a backup knows the painful and arduous process required to restore the machine to its previous state. As such, many of us keep regular backups of the data on our systems, just in case.

But there's another vast set of data many of us are creating on a daily basis that has little to no backup at all - beyond the services that host that content: our lifestreams. Now, a new service - named appropriately enough, LifestreamBackup - aims to provide the peace of mind that your lifestream data will always be just as accessible as the backup of your machine.

A new project called ContextMiner has been created by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The tool lets anyone automate the collection of links to online videos and blogs along with their extensive metadata. Although they're calling ContextMiner a YouTube archiving tool, it doesn't actually download the videos off the site...yet. Instead, it extracts the embed, and the provides that to you along with other details like the number of views and what sites are linking to the video.