FileThis|Fetch - another "keep it forever, keep it together" play.

Check out FileThis|Fetch. They will download your documents from banks and utilities and store them in your repository of choice: Evernote, Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, or Personal.com. They are following two trends that will be growing this decade as life-logging emerges and changes society: "keep it forever" and "keep it together."

The first trend is "keep it forever." Way back in the stone age of the 1980s, PCs were for geeks in business, and backups were only done by accountants on floppies. The rest of us had more fun to attend to. Then we hit the day when our family photos existed only digitally and had that aha moment: last year's status reports can get fried, but not my personal photos! More and more people are realizing that they want to keep their bits forever.  Backup services have moved from the fringe of geekdom to mainstream TV and radio ads, and using them has evolved from typing arcane commands to signing up for automated cloud-based services. 

The second trend is "keep it together." One of the first wins we discovered back in the MyLifeBits project was the power of bring data together. Instead of photos in the photo app, email in the email app, location in your GPS app, and so forth, we brought everything together. The result was potent. Now you could find photos taken at the same time as a calendar appointment or look for a document you emailed on the day you were in Boston.

FileThis|Fetch is part of both trends. You can keep access documents after the institution no longer makes them available to you online, or even after you have closed your account. And now you can find, say, all your financial statements from last March without having to login to each institution (your credit card, your bank, your 401K, etc.) individually.

This service is not the first and it won't be the last in this growing space. For example, it has a cousin in the social area called SocialSafe that will back up all your social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.) to your hard drive. 

The pitch of FileThis|Fetch says it is "fulfilling the promise of paperless." Back in 1999 when Gordon Bell started his effort to go paperless it opened the door to the world of life-logging and the digital life. Now we can see mainstream culture beginning to follow down his path.

Keep it forever, keep it together!

Eternos

A while ago I posted about Lifestream backup which makes a backup of your online life at facebook, twitter, wordpress, photobucket, etc. (Seems they have been renamed to "backupify"). Another entry in this space is Eternos "

Eternos supports backup of Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Picasa Web Albums, Blogs, and RSS feeds. You can see your posts in attractive timelines. One interesting twist they have is dealing with your data when you die: they let you designate trustees that will gain access to your account "upon confirmation you have passed on."

What would you save if your house was on fire?

(CNN) -- From baby deliveries to unexpected deaths, Mike Bowes, a 911 dispatcher from Quincy, Massachusetts, has handled a wide range of emergency calls.

But Monday night, the 44-year-old received an unexpected call from his neighbor: His own house was on fire.

...

In another coincidence, one of the first firefighters to arrive on scene was Mike Bowes' cousin, Tom Bowes.

Tom Bowes, a firefighter for the past eight years, scrambled into the house to salvage old albums with wedding and baby photos amid the flames.

But everything else -- the clothes, electronics and furniture -- were destroyed.

full story

Those of us without firefighter cousins need e-memories, with off-site backups.

Lifestream Backup rescues your stranded e-memories

In Total Recall, we bemoan web sites that have a stranglehold on your online e-memories. If it is not easy to make a copy of everything they store, then you are at the site’s mercy to retain your e-memories. Sites go out of business, or may just be sloppy with your data and lose some. Then, it is goodbye blog post, email, bookmark and so on. A manual process for each item would be way too much work to be practical; it must be one-step for a full backup, or, even better, fully automatic.

Enter the entrepreneurs. Lifestream Backup makes a backup of your online life at facebook, twitter, wordpress, photobucket, and more. You provide your login credentials for each service, and then they make regular backups, sending you an email to confirm when each backup is complete. They use Amazon S3 to store the backup, and also allow you to download the backup to your PC for extra protection.

Hat tip to cnet