Social Media Solutions: Back Up Your Files

0
50
Painting and photograph by Terry Sullivan. Copyright © Terry Sullivan. Used by permission of the artist.

We’ve all been told that it’s imperative to back up our computers and make sure that our files and data are secure. But now that we’re running on more mobile devices and working with more online content, it’s important to back up this content as well.

This is particularly true in terms of social media: Oftentimes, we’re so excited to move ahead and start developing a presence on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter and other platforms that we may not realize our content — text, photos, videos and graphics — is not even backed up. So, if you’ve spent a lot of time and effort building up your brand via social media, and for some reason you lose your account or you’ve been hacked, you’ll have to start from scratch. This could cost you a lot of money in time and effort to rebuild it all.

That’s one of the reasons a back-up software company like Acronis includes a Facebook back-up feature in the latest version of its True Image 2017 backup software. As it states on its website, “Don’t let accidental deletion or social network errors erase your memories and photos. Automatically back up Facebook.” According to the company, it will back up only changes to your feed, not the whole feed each time, to reduce back-up size. Plus, it works in the background without user intervention.

But it’s not the only solution available. For example, you can sign up for a service like Instaport, which backs up your Instagram posts, photos and videos to your local hard drive. Or you can use SocialSafe and back up several platforms at once, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and more.

There are other ways to create simple backups of your social media posts. You could create a running Microsoft Word document to back up your text-based posts, updating it as you go along. Or  you could create folders on your desktop and update your Word document every time you post, storing your photos and video in a folder labeled with the date of the post.

Find out more about the importance of backing up in my State of the Art column in the December 2016/January 2017 issue of Professional Artist magazine.

Terry Sullivan is the former editor of Professional Artist magazine and the former technical editor at American Artist magazine. He currently is an editor at Consumer Reports, where he covers digital cameras, camcorders, smart phones, audio and virtual reality. He is also an artist and musician. Follow him on Twitter: @TerryCR.