Lifestream Backup archives your online life

Lifestream Backup is a new service that backs up your data from a handful of popular online services including Flickr, Twitter, BaseCamp, Google Docs, and WordPress. You just provide it with your log-in credentials (or give it permission through authentication), and it quietly makes a daily or weekly backup of all your data from each site. It can then be viewed and downloaded if one of those places suffers an outage or data loss.

To give it a good test drive I tried it on my Flickr and Twitter accounts, as well as my Delicious bookmarks and Google documents. It took a little under a day to pull everything in, although the length of time it takes depends both on when it begins its backup, and how much you have on each service. The only exception was Delicious, which was never imported despite me providing the correct credentials.

As for Google Docs, what's nice is that it can grab documents from multiple Google accounts. I had it hooked up to two of mine. It pulled them in just fine, although it did not mark which account was which. It also does not tell you what type of document each saved item is. If they're text files this isn't a problem since they display right in your browser. If they're spreadsheets or presentations though, you have to save them to your hard drive and open them in something like Excel.

For Twitter it saved all of my past tweets in an XML file which could not be viewed in Firefox, IE, or Chrome. Instead I had to open it up in Windows Notepad and parse through coding wrappers to get to each tweet. They were all there though, going all the way back to 2007. Not a bad start, but the presentation left something to be desired; a spreadsheet would have been nicer

Of all of the services I tested, Flickr took the longest, and with good reason--photos are big. I've got more than 3,200 photos stored on Flickr. For size reasons, it does not download the full-quality version of each photo, which admittedly would fill up your 20GB quite quickly (my 12 megapixel shots run around 3MB to 4MB a pop). Nonetheless, I found this to be a major shortcoming, especially for pixel-peeping snobs like me who like to zoom into the details of large photos. It also did not keep any of the categorization I had worked so hard on back over on Flickr. Sets, tags, descriptions--none of that gets backed up.