How To Back Up Files That Only Exist In the Cloud

December 2014: When you think about backing up your files, you usually think about backing up your computer. But what about your files that reside in the cloud — and only in the cloud? Like your photos and videos on Picasa and Flickr and Instagram? Or your witticisms on Facebook and Twitter? Or your massive note collection on Evernote?

Back them up! Here’s how:

Each app has its own way of doing things (of course) but the concept is the same: take a snapshot of everything in your cloud account and put it on your hard drive, on an external drive or in another cloud account. 

Picasa
Use Picasa’s backup feature or download your photos directly to Dropbox with Picbackman.

Flickr
Flickr doesn’t provide a backup option so use a third-party app like Clip Your Photos or, if you want to migrate directly to Google+, use FlickrToPlus.

Instagram
Use Instaport to download your photos to your hard drive or external drive. You can also set your Instagram settings to save a copy to your phone.

Google+
Automatically back up your photos by turning on Auto Backup. Or sign into your account and use Google Takeout to create an archive of all your Google+ data plus many other Google apps, like Google Drive, Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Hangouts, Blogger, YouTube and more.

Facebook
Download practically everything in your account through your Facebook Manage Your Account page that you can access through Settings. Your archive comes in a folder with a combination of HTM files, JPEGs and MP4s.

Twitter
Download your entire archive in an HTML file by requesting it on your Twitter account setting page.

Snapchat
Sorry, there’s no way to back up your Snapchats. That’s kind of the point.

Evernote
You have two options using the Export function. Either export all notes or individual notebooks into an Evernote-specific file type you can restore within Evernote later, or export as HTML files for use in other apps.

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