I wrote about “social backup” provider Zoogmo back in 2007. At that time, they summed up their service as follows: “With Zoogmo you get FREE unlimited backup that automatically runs in the background and lets you protect your data at multiple remote locations that YOU choose.”

I wondered then about their business model. It now seems possible they didn’t have one, because I just received the following e-mail:

Valued Zoogmo Customer,

We would like to thank you for your loyal support.

Since we launched our backup service in August 2006 we have enjoyed serving you but the time has come for us to close our doors.

We plan to shut down our servers on 31st December 2009 at which point your backed-up data will no longer be available. We suggest that you check out www.mozy.com for unlimited online backup for just US$5/month. If you have any queries about our shutdown, please email us at info@zoogmo.com.

Thank you once again for using Zoogmo,

The Zoogmo Management

The online backup industry has become overpopulated and highly competitive. Some of the players are bound to have to drop out. Re-reading my posts about Zoogmo, I wonder whether Online Backup Vault, whose representatives posted comments to both of my Zoogmo entries, will fare better. One can’t tell from their blandly glossy stock-photo website. On the other hand, their comment-spam-marketing processes certainly wouldn’t encourage me to entrust my data to them.

Does the failure of Zoogmo suggest a problem for social backup in general? Will we see similar notices from companies like Cucku and CrashPlan soon? Or will we see more social backup because we’re having more social everything?

These days, people don’t share photos or other files by sending them directly to their friends. Instead, “sharing” means uploading the file to a server somewhere “in the cloud” and then letting everyone know where they can see/hear/download it. This is a generation accustomed to entrusting everything to someone else’s servers. Only the geeks, the old-fashioned, and the slightly paranoid are likely to prefer a system where they know exactly where their files are and who has access. And only the geeks are likely to have friends with computers that are secure enough to compete with the data centers where online backup providers rent server space.

And the geeks already have the means to send the files to each other. I didn’t use Zoogmo myself, beyond the initial trial so I could write the review. And I’m a slightly paranoid, old-fashioned geek. My own experience suggests that a social backup system has to offer significant benefits over and above what the technically savvy can do for themselves.

Or else it has to re-frame itself altogether, and become something like Dropbox. Backup is a valuable part of what Dropbox provides, yet it’s almost incidental to the real function of the service, which is to make it easier to share and synchronize files. That’s a much easier sell, with a much bigger market.

Zoogmo had an interesting concept, but despite a 2008 mention in Lifehacker, it never caught fire. It just may be that most people feel safer entrusting their data to strangers than to friends.

When I posted on LinkedIn that I was looking for subjects for this week’s Backup Reminder, David Battino pointed me to a blog post over on O’Reilly Digital Media. The post dates back to January of this year and recounts the hard drive failure the author, Darwin Grosse, suffered at Christmas—whereupon he discovered his most recent backup was four months old.

Ouch.

Since that time, Darwin decided to save himself from himself by using Dropbox. I’d used Dropbox only once before, in the course of co-hosting the For Immediate Release podcast back in May, so I thought of it mostly as a file-sharing tool, a way to synchronize documents across computers. This is certainly handy, but synchronization is not, by itself, backup.

But it turns out that Dropbox does backup, too. “It stores two months of revisions online,” David said, “So when a file went corrupt, I could backtrack. And backing up takes zero effort. You save your current projects in your Dropbox folder on your PC and they get uploaded automatically.”

In order to see how this worked, I downloaded Dropbox for myself and installed it both on Enna (my main laptop) and Mena (my netbook). Once you install it, Dropbox creates a “My Dropbox” folder that automatically copies any files you put in it first onto your Dropbox account (free for up to 2 GB storage, with plans starting at $4.99 month thereafter) and then onto any other computer you install the program on.

I can see how this will save me from crushed-USB-stick syndrome as long as I create and store any notes I take on Mena in the My Dropbox folder, and that’s great.

I’m learning, however, that instantaneous/continuous/copy-even-as-you-create-the-file backup is not a particularly good idea for all kinds of files. For instance, don’t try to make a backup of a Skype recording while you’re recording it. Bad things will happen. (In my case, it froze up my entire machine after about 15 minutes. If you have more RAM than I do, it might take longer for that to happen. Or not.) Create the recording first, save it, and then put it into the Dropbox. If you’re using something like Memeo Instant Backup that doesn’t restrict itself to one folder, turn it off or pause it until you’re making the recording.

But back to Dropbox and its backup-specific tools. Once you’ve installed Dropbox and put some files into your My Dropbox folder, you’ll notice their icons are overlaid with little green checkmarks. This appears to mean they have been successfully uploaded and synced. When you right-click on an item in the Dropbox, you see a new option, “Dropbox,” which gives you the option to see previous versions of the file. If you click on the link, it takes you to the web interface, where you can choose to either preview or restore earlier versions of the file.

On the plus side, Dropbox is easy to use and has multiple applications. It’s instantaneous as long as you’re connected to the Internet; if you aren’t, it will sync as soon as you have a connection again. And it really does provide for backup as well as synchronization, because, although it replicates changes across all the computers you have connected to it, it saves those previous versions.

On the minus side, only files in the “My Dropbox” folder get backed up. I suppose you could tell Outlook to store your .pst file in there…but I’m not sure you’d like the results, given what I said earlier about the potential negative effects of attempting to back things up while they’re in the process of changing. Outlook’s .pst file is one of those that doesn’t take well to being copied while it’s open. So if you want to use Dropbox for e-mail backups, you probably have to do it manually, and it’s not going to provide true e-mail synchronization anyway. Likewise, you’re going to need to remember to put certain other kinds of files into the Dropbox in order to get them backed up.  You’re probably safe enough letting things like Office docs just live there.

I don’t know that I would recommend Dropbox as a replacement for a dedicated online backup solution. I think too much is likely to get left out, and at least some of the online backup providers can handle backing up your e-mail. But I definitely recommend Dropbox for people who want to share and sync files and provide themselves with some extra backup redundancy in the process.

Finally, Dropbox hired CommonCraft to make their “tour” video, and I can’t resist including it here even though it doesn’t really address the backup features of the product.

P.S. If you use this link to sign up for Dropbox, you and I both get an extra 250 MB free storage space. It’s part of their campaign to get more users. I don’t know whether that quite counts as an affiliate link, but I’m pretty sure the arrangement is something the FTC would want me to disclose under their new rules.

I can’t see that anyone loses by it, though. I genuinely like Dropbox and think it’s going to be helpful for me. If you need to keep documents synchronized between computers or in a workgroup, you’ll probably find it useful, too.