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Ask Slashdot: Facebook Archiving?
Stenchwarrior writes "I was in the car with my wife and 15-year-old daughter this morning talking about the future of Facebook and how it's likely that they will not be around forever (or at least not at the same capacity as now) and my daughter asked 'Well, what's going to happen to all of my pictures?' It never occurred to her to that Facebook might not be around someday and all of those thousands of photos that she's uploaded might someday be gone. So this is what I ask the good people at Slashdot: What's a good way to preserve all of those memories? Many devices nowadays have direct access to the Internet and even to Facebook and once the images are uploaded they are eventually deleted to make room for more. How do we make sure we can access or backup those files in case Zuckerberg decides to sell out to Google or Microsoft and they do away with everyone's profiles?"
The simple answer to your question would be this.
You can get an entire compilation of every picture, post and conversation your account has had. Emails you a zip file in about 20 minutes
Theyre already gone. All you can do now is download the shitty low res copies facebook keeps
TIAEAE!
Back them up on MySpace
No panic, all her better pictures are archived on 4chan.
Trolling is a art,
If Facebook should go out of business, all of your photos and personal data will be sold to the highest bidder. I'm sure that ACME advertising would love to archive it for you.
It's time for your daughter to realize that her (and our) personal information are what constitutes Facebook's most valuable assets.
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
Facebook already has a export feature. Just export and store
Indeed, its fairly easy to find. Account (drop down) -> Account Settings -> Download your information
I should probably provide an (indirect) answer as I did not answer your question, If you're looking for backup software (which you are), these will probably be a goldmine for ideas:
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
I use Picasa instead of FB for photos.
1) I trust the longevity more. Feel free to disagree.
2) I can upload full resolution images.
3) My friends can download full albums of full resolution images if I've set privacy settings accordingly.
When people post images on FB, I'm always bummed that I can't backup the high quality image myself, and these days people seem to email around photo backups of events far less, and simply tag people on Facebook.
As far as backing up: I have everything important at full res in Picasa, in the cloud, I have them on my computer HD, my iPhone syncs full resolution copies daily, and I keep a regular external HD backup. That all seems pretty safe to me, especially compared to simply expecting FB to keep the sole copy forever.
Getting diabetes AND salmonella would be a bad weekend.
In my day, we had our own websites, and we were happy.
We had our own writing, our own art and our own photographs (and source code etc.) and we kept a backup on our own PCs. And we owned the copyright on the stuff that we had created ourselves. We put links to other peoples' web sites that we liked.
These young people today don't know know how easy they have it. And I'll tell you another thing, it's so easy for them, they've never had to think for themselves. And they've never had to take any responsibility.
When it all goes horribly wrong, they'll have nothing left and they won't know what to do, and when someone say, "Well, just restore from your backup." They'll say, "What's a backup?"
And you'll say, "The spare copies of everything that you kept for safe-keeping."
And there will be a look of bewilderment on their faces and they'll say, "I didn't know you could do that..."
Stick Men
This is what I hope a peer to peer social network could solve.
You'd be able to choose a host for your, uh, seed so there's some risk gone. But you could also sync your stuff to an encrypted vault with a few friends, and return the favor to them. That's pretty reliable. And then you could export the archive into a format that lots of people could unpack and use, because there's the original open source manager, and perhaps a bunch of alternatives/competitors using the same protocol like you see with bitTorrent clients.
It's not just about the network of your peers and privacy. It's also owning your lifestream in a format that's still useful five years from now. From there, building out management of a home library is pretty natural, even if it's never shared across the network. I lost almost all of my early journalistic work when my Hotmail account got wiped due to inactivity. That's hard to replace. A consolidated service to both store and share information could be really powerful and universally liked. Facebook is a reasonably effective start at this... but with some inextricable baggage around privacy, ownership and portability.
Diaspora, despite the rocky start, seems to be the most active project working on this. I hope it thrives.
The first thing wrong is that Facebook doesn't have any liability to YOU to keep the information you uploaded online and/or archived. And YOU, expecting Facebook to keep a backup is just moronic. If you upload a photo directly from your cell phone to Facebook, YOU as a Facebook user can't have any reasonable expectation that the photo will stay there, be backed up, or basically anything. It can stay there, it can be taken down, it can disappear without any notice, and if it's published to the public you can't have any expectation that the photo will not be used/copied/shared/drooled on by others that you don't want to have access. The only one responsible for the well being of that photo is YOU, and if you don't save it elsewhere on your own, then you really shouldn't own a cell phone that can take pictures anyhow.
Offers free web-based backup for a wide range of social sites: http://www.backupify.com/tour/details/facebook
If you're a Windows user - get Picasa.
If you're a Mac user - iPhoto works great.
If you're a Linux/BSD user - teach her about tar.
#DeleteChrome
Tell her the US Government has a copy of everything and they never go away. With proper identification, she can possibly request the pics under FOIA. ;-)
Indeed, the download is also very BROKEN and has been since they launched it...at least for anyone whos profile size is over ~1GB (easy to do with a few HD video uploads).
Only the first 1GB of the backup .zip will actually download...no error or "failed download", it'll just stop at about 1GB resulting in an incomplete and thus corrupt and unusable zip archive. Any browser, any OS (I've tried IE, FF, Chrome, and wget on Win7, Mac, and FreeBSD), it fails if it's larger then 1GB.
My
Yes I can make a hard copy of pictures and text I put on slashdot, and other websites, but the copies get lost, the websites purge the old stuff or disappear completely. My computers loose the stuff on them about once per year. Redundant times 4 or 5 is costly and/or time consuming. Even deciding what we want to keep long term is time consuming. there does not appear to be any good solution. Neil
There should be a word now for this rite of passage - the first time you realize how fragile the web service you depend on is, or even that you depend on it. It is a loss of innocence that you may not be able to prevent. For me it was when I upgraded machines and discovered that the five or six songs I had "bought" from RealPlayer's store (to listen to on my Palm Pilot) were only "mine" if I was willing to go through customer support hell each time I replaced my system or hard drive. .
Second. Don't be silly. IF you want to save status updates....