Many of us rely on Facebook to keep in touch with friends. After all, many people still shy away from newer services like Twitter or FriendFeed. The problem is, having all that data out in the cloud is risky.
What if Facebook removed your account? What if you wanted to take the data elsewhere? Despite their recent moves to open up, Facebook still make it difficult to remove your data.
Stepping in to solve this problem is SocialSafe. This Adobe Air app from a British team has the sole purpose of backing up your Facebook photos, address book and profile information. Accessing your account via Facebook Connect, it’s fast and effective at copying all the data to your local storage.
SocialSafe is a great way of hanging on to all the data you otherwise risk losing. Impressively, it downloads photos uploaded by others that have been tagged as including you, a great way of taking control of your image. There’s no way to backup your Facebook inbox as yet, but improvements are planned for the app so that could well be added in the future.
The question is, will you pay for the priviledge of backing up your Facebook account? The app costs $2.99, payable by Paypal. In an online world where we’re used to getting things (especially Adobe Air apps) for free this is might be a stumbling block for some, but if you rely heavily on Facebook it might well be worth the small price.
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