Tag Archives: downtime

Beach holiday, don't forget your memories this holiday

Don’t forget your memories this summer

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With the constant rush to always find and post about the next big adventure to keep up with those around us, we risk devaluing and forgetting the past, as well as accidentally archiving our own precious memories.

Are you following the mass exodus overseas or to the coast to make the most of the summer holidays?  Maybe you’re just trying to do something, anything, to fill up some of those six long weeks where the children are off school?

Whatever your plans, I’ll bet you’re expecting to take plenty of pictures to cement those lovely new memories you’ll make, of family time or fun with friends, where everybody is happy, relaxed and smiling, right?

Of course you are – it’s completely natural to document the best times of our lives, and then want to share the results with those who care about what we did and who we did it with.

But think back a year – can you remember what you were doing then? Who you were with, what you did, where you went?

Chances are you were having (another) brilliant time, which you documented by taking loads of pictures and sharing them to your social media platforms, probably to lots of likes and admiring or jealous comments.

But then what did you do? Unlike times past, where pictures would be sent away to be printed, with their return awaited with joyful anticipation and the whole experience relived as they were put in a photo album for posterity, things have moved on.

While online storage and display has many benefits, not least in saving bookcase space for actual books instead of photo albums, it has also made it much easier – arguably too easy – to archive our memories, both virtually and in the real world.

In the rush to find, and document, the next big thing and keep up with those we are connected with online, how often do we go back and relive the memories of good times past?

Those memories are still just as strong and vivid, the experience just as clear – and revisiting those pictures will evoke happy feelings all over again, but only if we remember to look for them and enjoy them once more.

But how to find them easily? If you’re an avid social media user – and that’s most of us these days – you’ll have posted many more pictures, albums and posts in the 52 weeks since last Summer.

While you can search within most platforms, these tools are clunky at best and can take just long enough to find what you are looking for that it takes the shine off the whole experience.

Not digi.me though, there all of your posted pictures (and statuses for that matter) are archived in an easily searchable way. And if you posted different ones on different platforms? No problem, they are all in one place, safely stored on your computer for you to enjoy in the way that best suits you.

Scroll through the dedicated photos section, with everything organised chronologically. Hit the flashback button and see what you were doing one, two and more years ago.

Maybe you want to make a collection of all of your holiday pictures from years past? See everything posted about your holiday across all social networks, complete with likes and comments, in one place – and export the data you want to a place of your choosing.

Whatever you want to do with your data, the story of your life, digi.me lets you. Download a copy for free now and release your memories as you let your data soar free.

Facebook Privacy Basics

Facebook Terms & Policy Update – What does it mean for your data?

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If you have a Facebook account you may have noticed a little icon pop up in the top right of your account making you aware about the latest Facebook terms and policy changes.  Most people tend to ignore these small changes but it is always worth noting how recent changes affect who owns your data.

The latest changes on Facebook attempt to make it clearer who has access to your data and how.  The big changes are mainly in the area of tracking data on your mobile device.  So if you are a mobile user your usage statistics including GPS data will now be stored against your Facebook account.  Also included in this recent update is a log of websites you have visited whilst you are logged into Facebook.  This information is collected and used to help advertisers target advertisements that are more relevant to your interests.  Whilst this information has been collected in the past it hasn’t been as clear what it was being used for.

If you don’t want Facebook to know where you have been and when, the advice online is to use the web version of Facebook rather than the Facebook app.  This way you keep your location data private when you are out and about.

What can we do to help you manage your data?

SocialSafe which is transitioning to Digi.Me can help you manage and store your social media content including your Facebook data. At the end of the day your data belongs to you and as such we provide you with the tools to take a copy of your data from Facebook (along with many other data sources) and store it locally so that you have your data on your computer. This means that if there is an outage on Facebook or you decide that you no longer wish to use a social media provider you can download a copy of your data including your images and status updates.  You no longer have to lose those all important moments that you once shared with friends, family and colleagues.  Give SocialSafe a try today by clicking on the link below. It’s free and puts you in control of your data! (Plus there is so much more you can do with your data when you have it all to yourself!)

Try SocialSafe

Second #FacebookDown Outage In Recent Weeks – Is Your Data Safe?

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Last night the users of a social network were once again separated from the content they’d created and the conversations they’d had, after another outage restricted access to the site. The #FacebookDown hashtag spread across other social networks after users were subjected to the second Facebook outage within a few weeks.

Dislike. Thumb down sign on white background. 3d

It wasn’t an overwhelmingly long outage, with Facebook working again for most users within half an hour. Facebook later confirmed that the cause of the problem was caused by and error the team encountered while making an infrastructure configuration change. Short outage or not, if there is crucial information locked within a social network – and think of all the messages that you might need to refer to – then these sorts of outages can become very problematic:

[tweet https://twitter.com/lmbrownlee1/status/507253824923635712]

Others took a slightly more comedic stance at the news:

[tweet https://twitter.com/ryangerritsen/status/507337696201949184]

[tweet https://twitter.com/OMGFacts/status/507255967415676928]

The point remains that whenever you don’t have a copy of your content, then you can never be fully in control of it. Yesterday’s outage – along with other recent instances of social network downtime – only serves to highlight the importance of keeping a backup of your content.

SocialSafe allows you to download your social network posts, pictures, messages and more, directly to your own PC or Mac. Once there, you have the freedom to browse, view, search and do more with that content. The built-in features such as Collections, Insights and PDF Export really do put you in control of your content.

To start backing up your content now, download SocialSafe for free.

Facebook Outages – Can You Access Your Content In An Emergency?

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At the end of last week some Facebook users were unable to log in to the social network, instead encountering the following error message:

facebook down

It didn’t appear to be a complete outage, as the issue only affected some users. However, as Facebook is increasingly used as an online ID to log in to more and more sites and services, any Facebook downtime can have further reaching effects than simply not allowing you to access the social network itself:

[tweet https://twitter.com/joedawsonnn/statuses/464916690716065792 align=’center’]

According to a spokesperson, the outage is now fixed, and a message on Facebook’s Platform Status page confirms that the sitewide issues were resolved in the early hours of Saturday morning.

While a minor outage only affecting some users, it does go to show that even without the malevolent interference of hackers, there is always a risk that you could be separated from your data if you entrust all of it to someone else to look after for you.

It’s easy to forget how much important information can be held on social networks – just think about all of the addresses, timings and other details that we take for granted as being available 24/7. The only way to be sure that you’re doing all you can to ensure you are able to search for something said on or contained on your social networks is to keep your own copy of your data.

At SocialSafe we believe that you should be the single biggest owner of your data, so if you want to download your Facebook Messages, back up your tweets, download your tagged photos and more, start your very own SocialSafe library now for free.

Instagram Outage – How To Download And View Your Photos Offline

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Photo sharing site Instagram experienced a period of downtime over the weekend that manifested itself by the app being in a perpetual period of loading the feed, but to no avail. Somewhat predictably, users vented their cynicism and ire on other social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, the latter of course being the owner of Instagram.

A lot of the jokes revolved around not being able to see what everyone was eating, or what the sky looks like, however others offered tongue in cheek suggestions for what might be causing the issue:

[tweet https://twitter.com/gordondowns/statuses/455043989649903616]

Instagram eventually tweeted to acknowledge the problem, identifying it as a feed delivery issue that they were working on fixing. Everything seems to be back to normal, and the outage was indeed a temporary glitch.

However, Saturday’s downtime is yet another example of what can happen when you aren’t the one in possession of your content – the other party can drop the ball and you can’t access it. This isn’t a problem if you back up your content to your own personal data store, and here at SocialSafe we’re immensely proud of the standard of our Instagram backup service.

Not only can you download all your Instagram images, but all of the comments, tags, likes and followers/following are also backed up to your library, which allows you to search across your images and people. What is more, our Instagram Insights give you the chance to examine the popularity of your images, see which filters you use the most, and see which filters perform the best with your followers:

To download your Instagrams (and also backup a number of other social network accounts), get SocialSafe for free and start backing up your memories to a place you own and control.

Lessons To Be Learned From Turkey’s Twitter Shutdown

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One of the problems inherent with social networks is also the one of the biggest reasons that we use them – because other people use these networks. The likes of Facebook, Instagram, Google+ and the others wouldn’t be half as much fun if you couldn’t connect and converse with other users, or if there was no one else to like your posts and leave comments. However, what if the other people who use the networks start misbehaving?

We’re all using a communal area to share content and interact with our own networks of connections, but if enough people are deemed to have abused the service or used it for purposes considered to be illegal, then there is the risk that the whole thing may be shut down. Last week, Twitter was blocked by the Turkish government after the network had been used to distribute material that purportedly showed corruption inside Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s inner circle.

This blog is not the place to be discussing any of the political or moral issues surrounding the events, but we will look at the reality of the situation. And this reality is the fact that one day people were free to log on to Twitter and access their information and historic content, and the next day they were not. The overwhelming majority of Turkish people using Twitter will not have been responsible for the actions that caused the government to take the steps it did, however they paid the price for being part of that network.

It goes to show that even though we have every faith the content we create online will always be there whenever we may need to reference it, the unfortunate reality is that there is simply no way of knowing whether or not a network may have technical problems, be attacked by hackers, or forcibly made unavailable to you.

The best way to ensure that you can always access the content you have shared and created on social networks is to keep your own personal copy of it. You never know when you may need to look back, nor do you know if there will ever been anything stopping you from doing so when that need arises. With SocialSafe you can become the master of your own destiny when it comes to your information, by creating your own personal data library that you own and control.

Facebook Messages & Twitter Experience Downtime – How To Protect Your Content

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In the last few days there have been reports of outages affecting Facebook Messages and Twitter. Both services seem to be running smoothly again now, but at the time when they were unavailable there must have been a large number of people who wondered what was going to happen to their data.

It’s easy for people to make jokes about soaring office productivity whenever a social network experiences downtime, but as more and more businesses utilise these sites for marketing and customer communication, being unable to access records of interactions – even temporarily – can be very problematic indeed.

The case for keeping a local copy of your social network data grows stronger with every further outage. So whether or not you need to access Twitter DMs in order to find a friend’s phone number, or whether you need to reference a customer enquiry that you received via your company’s Facebook Page, there’s every reason to back up your online content.

With SocialSafe you can ensure that any social network downtime doesn’t affect your ability to look back on your customer interactions. By creating an offline record of your content from different social networks that is also searchable, SocialSafe affords businesses not only peace of mind, but also allows them to get more out of their data than they can when it is all held on separate social networks.

Whether you’re an individual wanting to keep a log of your personal activities, or a company looking for a compliance and archiving tool for online customer engagement across social platforms, download the free trial of SocialSafe to start keeping this content secure on you own machine.