BackupMyMail is Here!

For the last six weeks or so I've been working on a new startup. The company does exactly what it's name suggests: BackupMyMail backs up your email.

What we do a little differently than others is that we backup your online email account (Gmail or Hotmail, for example) and store it in the cloud, where we keep it available for you to download if you ever need it.

The reason we started the company is simple. More and more of our important data is being used by applications that are hosted on line. We've become used to the idea that we should backup our personal computers, but are just now becoming aware that our online data is also at risk.

We would hope that major email providers would have a good backup scheme. To be sure, Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and the rest all do have reasonably good backup measures. But that doesn't necessarily keep your email safe. Gmail has lost entire accounts. Not many, but it does happen. All of the majors reserve the right to delete your account. (This happened to me with my old Hotmail account. I didn't log in for 30 days, and when I finally did, everything was gone.) But the most compelling reason to manage your own backups is that you control the data. With BackupMyMail, you can go back in time and extract your account as it was then - before you deleted that customer's email.

BackupMyMail is in beta, and will be giving away free 30 day trials for the next few weeks or so. Sign up for one now and let me know what you think!

Note: the beta version of BackupMyMail only works with Gmail (and Google Apps mail), and is limited to 1GB of mail. Both restrictions will eventually be lifted (sooner rather than later, we hope).

You can also follow us on Twitter at @backupmymail.