But with SocialSafe, no matter what an evil hacker does, you would never actually lose your data. It's all safely stored on your own computer. (Those people who are currently affected by the ongoing "site maintenance" issue that has locked an unknown number of people out of their accounts could probably have used a program like this too.)

The new addition of Facebook Wall Backup adds another component to SocialSafe's Time Capsule feature which lets you see how your Facebook account has changed over time - that is, from your first backup onward. It provides an overview of your Facebook account where you can see the friends and photos you've added, those you've removed, and so on. It's also an easy way to scan your "digital diary" for any time period. Now with your Wall Posts backed up too, you can quickly navigate to any old post and its associated comments instead of having to manually click the "Older Posts" button at the bottom of your Facebook Wall time and time again.

The new version of the SocialSafe application will be made available for download from the company's home page here.

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.

How Do You Backup Your Contacts? The Results of the Twitter/FriendFeed Poll

Is an iTunes backup stored off-site the most efficient way to go? Is that how most people handle this issue? Curious, I did what any social media addict would do: I asked Twitter and FriendFeed. The answers I received have me pondering my options. After receiving nearly 30 responses, I was surprised to find how many people rely on Google as their address book (14 responses). In fact, keeping your addresses and phone numbers in Google and syncing that address book to your iPhone is actually what a lot of people consider a "backup" these days.

But as much as I trust in Google, the old I.T. girl in me can't help but think "single point of failure, single point of failure!" Truth be told, several folks must feel the same because they also used another method on top of the Google solution, often MobileMe.

MobileMe wasn't as popular as I would have expected, though. Only five people said they used it. That number would probably be higher if it wasn't a paid service.

Seven people counted on iTunes to do the backup for them, but a few were careful to also make sure their PC was backed up as well.

I'm hesitant to sync my Google contacts to my iPhone for reasons I've stated before, but it couldn't hurt to make sure that my iPhone contact information also exists in my online address book...something that I know isn't the case as I recently found out when the phone's battery died during a phone call and I frantically searched for my friend's number on the web.

iPhone Contact Backup: Yep, There's An App for That

I also recently happened across an additional solution which you could add to your backup routine with ease. Called iDrive Lite, this free iPhone application will quickly backup all your contact info to your device in case you ever accidentally delete an important address or phone number. You'll also want to activate the app's "Web Enable" feature which backs up your contact data to the web where you can access it anytime at idrivelite.com. Not bad for a free service.

Your Turn! RWW Poll

If you didn't have a chance to participate in the Twitter poll, please participate in this one below. Now, we know not everyone is an iPhone user here at RWW, but we know that a lot of you are, so let us know how you backup your contacts! If you find yourself marking "other," feel free to comment and explain.

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.

The most obvious example of this loss of access to lifestream data? The inability to access anything beyond beyond page 162 on Twitter. No matter how many times you've posted, you cannot go back any further than 3240 tweets. So, every new public message you send removes one from your history. (To see this in action, simply add "?page=162" to the end of any Twitter user's default URL.) Those who had seen Twitter as a journal of sorts for recording fleeting moments for posterity, suddenly found those moments just as fleeting online.

That's just one example. There are thousands of others: blogs crashing, videos being taken down, companies shutting down services. The list goes on and on.

The point being: saving the content you are producing elsewhere so that you always have access to it is going to become a bigger and bigger problem as time goes on - especially as more and more people move into the social Web. For that reason, LifestreamBackup seems to be ahead of the game with this proposed offering.

While not yet available, LifestreamBackup proposes to launch in the coming weeks. For a small fee, the service will take your various feeds and back them up on Amazon S3 - either your account or theirs. Current pricing is set at $6.95 per month for 10G of data.

"We will launch with the ability to backup Flickr and a blog (via RSS feed). Google Docs, Twitter feeds, Youtube and Facebook backup are all in the works and will come shortly after launch. If it has an API that allows us to pull data, we are happy to back it up for you."

For more, Lifestream Blog points us to a video from "Somewhat Frank" Gruber where a number of people - for the first few minutes - chat about the pros and cons of the concept.

Suffice it to say, it's a start. And, a step in the right direction. LifestreamBackup isn't likely to take the market by storm. But it's important to consider it, nonetheless, because it's definitely addressing a growing need.

We're still very early in this version of the Web. There's no doubt that saving the things that are important to us - our social interactions and our historical references - for future reference will become a very important business indeed.

(Image "Lifestream-Seaform" courtesy jemsweb. Used under Creative Commons.)

Why Use ContextMiner?

Marketers will probably be interested in how this free tool is able to track views and links, but that's not really the purpose behind ContextMiner's creation. Instead, the tool is designed more for research than anything else. For example, one of the main reasons to use ConextMiner is its ability to document the cultural phenomena of viral videos.

Often, when a video goes viral, very few people are aware of where it came from, what the story is behind it, who created it and why. As time goes by, finding the original video creator and source is even harder as the video spreads across the internet. But now, thanks to ContextMiner, the history behind a video's creation is no longer a mystery.

Take for instance, Vote Different, the mashup of Hillary Clinton with the famous Apple 1984 Super Bowl ad and one of the most popular videos on YouTube. We've probably all seen this video at one point or another, but did you ever want to know who created it and why?

With ContextMiner, that information can easily be discovered. Because of its ability to pull the inbound links to a video, we can see that the original creator of the video, a user by the name of "ParkRidge47," is the subject of one of the inbound links to the video. A blog post on TechPresident titled "Who is ParkRidge47?" gives us a great history of this particular video's creation. You could also sort through the links provided to find the very first person to link to the video, which is often the creator themselves.

ContextMiner is still under development. In the future, the developers hope to offer tools and policies for exporting the videos, blog pages, and metadata. That's probably not an empty promise - there's already an an option to "download Flash video from YouTube" on the campaign creation form, it's just disabled right now. When that feature becomes available, we think it would be fine to then call ContextMiner a YouTube archiving tool. Since "Archive" implies making a backup copy, until then we think ContextMiner should really just be considered a research tool. Still, we have to say, it's a pretty good one.

Yesterday, PutPlace's service launched into public beta. With this launch, Windows users (for now - Mac is coming later) can create an account and set up the folders they want backed up on their home computers' using the PutPlace desktop software. The software is not restricted to a certain number of machines, either. It can be - and should be - installed on all the PCs in the home. That's because PutPlace is designed for tracking the various versions of digital files as they move around your personal home network as well as when they make it to various online storage service, like flickr.

PutPlace knows that users with several computers in the home often end up with multiple copies of the same file and it can hard to determine which one is the newest. To determine the file versions, PutPlace digitally fingerprints each file with a hash so that it can then track it wherever it goes - whether to your laptop or online.

Adding "Web Places"

After setting up your folders to be backed up on your home computers, you can then add "web places" to your account. At the time of launch, this is a very short list - only flickr is included, but supposedly, in the future, the service will include other sites as well.

However, despite this lack of supported web services at the moment, one of PutPlace's better features is its ability to monitor specified folders on your computer and auto-publish them to sharing services. With this option turned on, you can have PutPlace setup to push all your pictures to flickr without having to manually use flickr's uploader tool. For those that publish a lot of pictures to flickr, this feature could be a huge timesaver.

The Desktop Software

Setting up the desktop software is easy enough to do and there's even an online Quick Start Guide with screenshots to walk you through the process. There are other online guides and a FAQ available from the service's help page. Configuring folders to auto-publish must be done from the web interface to PutPlace, not the desktop software, which honestly took me a couple of minutes to realize after exploring all the options in the desktop software's menus.

The Public Beta

While PutPlace is in beta, the software is free*. (*Up to 2 GB). After the beta period is over, pricing will be determined, but it will be on an pay-for-what-you-use basis.

In this early state, some have compared PutPlace to syncplicity without the sync and collaboration. That's somewhat true except for PutPlace's emphasis on tracking files and auto-publishing them to web services. Of course, with only one source so far (flickr), that option may only hold limited appeal at the moment. If in the future, PutPlace added more services (and there really are so many today - just think of all the ones you can add to FriendFeed!), then it could become more useful.

There's also the possibility that PutPlace may have to, one day, compete with Windows Live Mesh. Currently only in a "technical preview" itself, this service is really a platform built with standard protocols like HTTP, RSS, REST, ATOM and JSON . While at the moment, Mesh only does sync, storage, web access to files, and remote access to meshed machines, there's no reason why, further down the line, it could not also compete with the type of service that PutPlace offers.

However, all that being said, PutPlace may still be worth a look. Since it is providing free online backup and storage, frugal folks like myself will probably utilize PutPlace's free service for a while to back up some files in addition to all those we already have spread out across the web on other free storage services. Also, for photographers especially, the tool which auto-syncs files to flickr could make the service beneficial. (That is...if they're running Windows. )

The service, which offers a free 45 day trial, costs $49.99/year for 10GB of storage with plans running up to $249.99/year. The company is running a special 50% off the first year promotion, but 200 ReadWriteWeb readers can have the promotional price extended to two years by clicking this link.

SugarSync provides both a PC and Mac client, as well as mobile clients for the Blackberry and Windows Mobile and a browser-based application.

How Does It Perform?

SugarSync is the product of nearly four years of work by the crew at Sharpcast, and the result is quite nice. It's an easy to use system that can free your data from a single, physical location. It has some nice features, such as the ability to share photos with friends, or the ability to lock certain versions of files online so that even if they're updated locally you still have a backup of the original. It also has some things we wish it did better, such as automatic file versioning, which is absent in this release.

In January, we said that Sharpcast reminded us of Feedburner, "in that it wants to become the leading platform for a new type of media service that only came into being in the Internet age." In Feedburner's case that service was RSS, whereas for Sharpcast that technology is file syncing.

Unlike Feedburner, though, SugarSync is entering a slightly more crowded space. They face competition from BeInSync, Windows Live FolderShare, and the currently in beta Y Combinator startup Dropbox. Even so, SugarSync comes to the table with a very nice product that is super easy to use and quite polished (it should be after 4 years!), so we still expect that our earlier prediction that it could be a future acquisition target to hold true.

Have you tried SugarSync? What about any of its competitors? Which do you like better? Let us know in the comments below.

Note: An earlier version of this article erroneously stated that SugarSync costs $49.99 per month for the 10GB package. That is incorrect. $49.99 is the yearly price at that storage level.