Inspirational

marco:

…[omitted: analysis of Sidekick incident]…

You aren’t in control of your data if you can’t easily and frequently make useful backups onto your own computer and your own media.

I recognize that it’s hypocritical for me to say this as the lead developer of Tumblr, which does not yet offer an automated feature for users to download backups of their blog content. So I took some time this week and started to write one. I’m happy to announce that Tumblr will be releasing an easy backup tool in the coming weeks. (I will also make an easy backup feature for Instapaper shortly.)

All of my blog’s content, with images, is less than 200 MB. A list of my entire Instapaper reading history is less than 1 MB. The sum of my contacts and calendar data, synced by MobileMe, is probably less than 5 MB. That’s nothing, and given how much time I’ve put into the creation of all of this data, and that it would only consume a third of a $0.26 Taiyo Yuden CD-R (or less than 5% of a $0.45 TY DVD+R), it’s embarrassing that offline backups onto my own media haven’t become routine.

So I’m hereby starting the trend of backing up my hosted data just as carefully, completely, and frequently as my local files. I know this won’t spread to most people, because most people don’t care. But I certainly do, and if you’ve made it this far into this post, you probably do, too.

If my data suddenly and permanently disappears from a hosted service, it should only be an inconvenience, not a loss.

This post, more than anything, makes me extraordinarily happy to be using Tumblr.  Marco displays here his character. A commitment to Dataportability is extremely hard to swallow for most publishing platform, because it’s hard to argue against the business logic of keeping users locked in.

In my opinion, the loyalty you engender from power users, the good will you get from people like Marco and I who care, and the mindset/inspiration/integrity your company gains by putting user needs ahead of your own, more than make up for the small percentage of people who want to leave but are waiting won’t until it’s easy to move their data. (and, in fairness, Tumblr has a TON of lock-in through the social network and dashboard system).