Cloud Preservation, a service from Nextpoint, is a simple service for archiving data from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other web-based services. The company pitches its service as a compliance tool, but it makes sense as a storage tool for anyone that might want to have a backup of all the information they’re putting into these sorts of services. The company crawls and archives pages from the service and stores them as HTML which can then be saved or exported as a PDF. Interestingly, the service can also follow links and archive the first page of each link it finds in any given feed.
It was easy to setup and get started archiving my Twitter feed, but for some reason the service won’t recognize my facebook page.
The company offers four price plans:
- Basic: $15 a month, 5 feeds and up to 1 gig of storage
- Plus: $95 a month, 10 feeds and up to 10 gigs of storage
- Pro: $295 a month, 50 feeds and up to 25 gigs of storage
- Managed: Variable pricing, unlimited feeds and storage
Those are some pretty big price and storage jumps, and one gig of storage just doesn’t seem like a lot these days.
Cloud Preserve competes with Backupify and Iterasi, which also offers web archiving tools.
The ability to automatically archive social media streams, and the pages linked to, reminds me of the seemingly defunct Twitchboard and Chris Arkenberg‘s “personal cloud agent” concept. Our Sarah Perez covered this idea in 2008:
These cloud agents, as he describes them, will help us sort and search the massive volumes of data we interact with regularly. He envisions that soon we’ll have many of these cloud agents, swarming around us, working on our behalf, helping to parse the data flowing in and providing us with the information that we need, separated from the noise.
Sadly, it seems like we’re still a long way from this, but maybe cloud archiving services will help bring us one step closer.
(hat tip: Wes Unruh)
