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I got another email from Backupify, the cloud-based backup company. We have written before about them here. Usually, these emails just confirm that the backups of my Gmail, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter et al. accounts have completed successfully, but this one was different. They were telling me that they were in the process of migrating from an old system to a new one, and I had until the end of the month to make sure that my accounts were protected and authorized on the new system.

Classy.

It's March 31, 2011. Do you know where your company's mission-critical data backups are? They, of course, should be safely stored someplace where you can access them easily should anything happen to your machine or network. More importantly, they should be up to date.

Far too many individuals and businesses are lax about keeping their data backed up on a regular basis. That's why a group of Reddit users decided to propose the first-ever World Backup Day to take place tomorrow, March 31.

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.

Earlier this week, electronics retailer Best Buy announced a new mobile backup service called mIQ. Designed to compete with similar services like Apple's MobileMe or Microsoft's My Phone, mIQ offers up to 1 GB of storage space in the cloud for photos, video, contact and calendar information, SMS messages, and more. However, unlike its competitors, mIQ has a couple of distinct advantages: it's 100% free and anyone can sign up to use it.

Did you know that your tweets have an expiration date on them? While they never really disappear from your own Twitter stream, they become unsearchable in only a matter of days. At first, Twitter held onto your tweets for around a month, but as the service grew more popular, this "date limit" has dramatically shortened. According to Twitter's search documentation, the current date limit on the search index is "around 1.5 weeks but is dynamic and subject to shrink as the number of tweets per day continues to grow."

What that means is something tweeted prior to a week and a half ago can never be retrieved via search.twitter.com. That's bad for users and it's definitely bad for data-mining. Unless Twitter corrects this issue on its own, we have to find another solution for archiving tweets ourselves. Here are 10 ways to do so.

Quanp, a new service from office electronics company Ricoh, has just launched a beta of their online storage system which offers an interesting twist to the usual backup services: a visual search tool that displays your data in 3D. The 3D viewer is actually a desktop application designed for Windows PCs, but Mac users aren't entirely out of luck - there is an online version of the service, too.