Someone perceptive who noticed that I complained about my Facebook profile getting hosed twice already asked me if there was a backup for it, which I think is a brilliant question, especially since some people don’t realize that unlike a real email account, these messages go into never-never land once an account is arbitrarily wiped, at least insofar as the messages the person sending subscribing submits to the site.

On Facebook I just did a search for “Facebook Backup” and narrowed the search to applications and got a bunch of things I’m going to check out, thanks to him, but in the meantime, here is what I do to mitigate the damage that is caused when this happens and what I’m doing to avoid it in the future:

• To keep an audit of my status updates, I have a pretty complicated method: I synch with Twitter (there is a Facebook application to do this) and use Twittermail.com to update Twitter and Facebook by sending messages to a secret email address. If I’m not near a computer I either send a tweet/status update without it being included in my audit by using a text message on my phone, but going forward I’ll be smarter and will send a twittermail from my blackberry, which automatically puts a copy into my mail client! Until twittermail works without paying charge to send me all responses and the tweets I send from my phone, I’ll look for a way to get a twitter back up. When I’m by a computer, I simply email from Outlook my 140 character or less “micro-blog”. Thus far I have not been able to get Twittermail to send me all of my received tweets back, but supposedly it does that in summary form, which is cool. Then I have something called Loudtwitter, which my friend Brian uses, which doesn’t work for me yet, for some reason. What this does for him is bullet-points his tweets and adds them to his Livejournal page, which is so cool, as I don’t blog on there at all, except to sometimes cross-post, which this effectively does. I have a control-issue with other sites being able to delete my original content, so while LJ has its benefits, I even dismay the lack of an audit of the messages my friends post there, not to mention comments on my postings. I do believe there is an LJ archive feature, so I will be testing that out too.
• I have kept every email I ever got from FB confirmations and additions.  As I receive them, as time allows, I reconcile them with my address book in Outlook.    I grab as much information as I can from every person I approve (which requires that they have a believable face and hopefully a believable name).  I know it’s a lot of work, but I could win a prize for my database skills using Outlook, which I like to brag I’ve customized the hell out of (particularly insofar as the fields and format of the contacts go). While I have not been able to overcome the limitation of using the embedded picture feature in the 2007 contact form, I do have a field where I drop as many pictures as I want of my contacts, but no matter how I name the photos, it won’t work for appearing as that person when I synch with my Windows Mobile phone unless I’m using the original boring contact form, which I did with only the oldest of contacts that I have in my address book (i.e., 1995 is when I first started using Outlook and I have an email archive going back that far).. If someone out there knows a solution to this problem, please let me know, because all of my research has come up blank.
• I do not reply to any messages on FB. I will take the email from the administrative Facebook account that forwards the message to me, which I understand is a ploy to get me to visit the site and succumb to their advertising. I believe these messages always has the entire content of the message and so what I do is — rather than linking to the insipid message center on their site – I forward the email to the person at his or her bona fide email address through my Outlook mail reader (which of course contains my own domain accounts). This is the only way I know of to keep an audit of the messages I send!
• As for what happened to my profiles, they would not explain and even though I’ve talked to members who said they have had their profiles reinstated, sometimes twice, I have not had any success with my appeal as there is no true due process there, which I suppose is their right to exercise, but it’s also my right to moan incessantly about it.  The one who got his profile reinstated twice said he knew someone deep within the organization. I don’t have any political pull there.  I’m pretty pissed that this is so arbitrary. My theory is that the first time I got knocked off it was for adding friends “too quickly” — an algorithm for which they won’t disclose, which I guess makes sense, but it’s intended to prevent bots from going in and adding everyone in creation to their lists.  There is apparently a limit of 5,000 friends, so not sure how much damage one person having that many friends could do.
• The second time I probably was “reported” for telling one or more people who kept on trying to link to me with their faceless, closeted, fake profiles to drop dead (soon).  See my chat netiquette blog for my logic on these morons. I have no patience for people like that.  Now I’m a bit more clever.  I accept them, glean their email address so that I can write them directly from my email account with an impolite request to take a long walk off a short pier and then block them and remove them from my friend list on FB, usually advising them that they are being reported for having a fake profile. What gets me irate the most are the people who post a picture of a koala bear or some other object to avoid their wives from finding them.
• Toward that end, this is what I say in my Facebook profile: “For all of my up to date content, check out my personal web sites: Haydennet.com & Trupa.com. I ONLY RESPOND TO PEOPLE VIA EMAIL. I will not send any more monitored third party web site messages. … Activities I do? Apparently rebuilding my Facebook profile every time it gets wiped on a whim without any due process or explanation. Please NOTE: I do NOT respond to messages on Facebook. If you send me a message, you will be emailed a response (if warranted) at your REAL email address. Likewise, I strongly prefer to receive REAL emails. I do not live on this or any other third party web site that controls MY content. Thank you in advance. Indeed, MY uncensored (but family-friendly) content is completely under my control on my personal web site at Haydennet.com, so please link to that for fresh pictures with captions, videos and blogs. Other sites I have include my family/genealogy site (Trupa.com) and my business site (Ursinet.com). Some netiquette for this site [which goes for all sites]: 1. Do not contact me without a clear face showing in your profile where you are unhidden by sunglasses. 2. Do not request a friend link if you are an organization. That’s what groups are for.”
• Now I even have applications that synchronize the birthdays of everyone on FB that I’m linked to, as well as all events that I’ve been invited to, so that even if my profile were to be deleted for a third time tomorrow, I’d have the data that I’d need to almost completely reconstruct the profile that I’ve had with hundreds of people on it.
• When I need to rebuild a profile, I can mass export the email addresses of my preferred contacts into a text file and then and use the Friend Finder on FB to re-invite everyone, albeit with their generic invitation about sharing “pictures” which is so outdated. Invariably some people get annoyed and the re-request, because they presume I had removed them.