Office 2.0 removes the need to backup your personal hard drive, but it does not mean that you should not backup your personal data. When your data is managed by reliable service providers such as Google or Salesforce.com, the likelihood that they could lose it is significantly lower than the risk or losing your laptop or getting it stolen. Nevertheless, I’d rather be safe than sorry. This article explains how I backup my data online.

Emails stored in Gmail
As described in this previous article, all incoming emails are automatically forwarded to a backup Yahoo! Mail account. To do this, you can either use Gmail’s forwarding option or set a custom filter, while creating new accounts on Yahoo! Mail as the older ones get full.

Data stored in Salesforce.com
I implemented an automated monthly backup of all my data, including attached documents. The backup file is usually generated overnight by Salesforce.com’s servers, then copied onto a couple of remote servers that I own, on two separate continents, thereby significantly reducing the risk of data loss because of property theft or fire. Because the information I store into Salesforce.com is the one that I want to keep confidential the most, I have been reluctant to store my backup files onto the servers of any other service provider, mainly for security reasons, but I will once I figure out a good encryption scheme.

Pictures stored in Flickr
This information is not currently backed up, which is not good. I am currently reviewing the APIs offered by Flickr and 23 and might create a hosted upload interface that would allow me to upload pictures onto separate Flickr and 23 accounts all at once. If I go about implementing such a service, I might add the on-the-fly conversion of RAW files into one of the file formats that are currently supported by Flickr (BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG and TIFF).

Articles and Comments stored in WordPress
This one is on its way. I am trying to retrofit my old TypePad account as an archive for my current WordPress account and get WordPress to feed my TypePad-powered backup through RSS. More on this later.

Documents stored in Zoho
I have yet to start on this one. Ideally, I would like the backup to be stored by Salesforce.com. Currently, the two are integrated through a single custom link that requires me to copy the URL of the Zoho document into the URL field of a custom object created in Salesforce.com. This is a little bit cumbersome and some tighter integration would be welcome. I might add automated backup from Zoho into Salesforce.com once I get this done.

Connections created in LinkedIn
I currently manually synchronize my connections created in LinkedIn with my contacts stored in Salesforce.com and use the LinkedIn user ID as unique identifier. This is painful and a total waste of time, especially because some Salesforce.com contacts are related to multiple LinkedIn accounts that were created by the same person over time with multiple email addresses. Hopefully, LinkedIn will eventually add an API that will automate most of this work.