Safer storage for online data

Would you sweat if you accidentally deleted a crucial spreadsheet you had toiled over using Google Docs? Would your spouse wail if someone hacked into your Flickr account and deleted years of vacation photos uploaded there?

Safeguarding files that you keep on Internet-based services is the simple idea behind Backupify Inc., a start-up born in Louisville, Ky., that last week moved into new offices in East Cambridge.

It offers a free service for consumers who might want an additional copy of that video they uploaded to Facebook, plus a paid offering geared to businesses, many of which are required by regulations to archive something as innocuous as a Twitter message.

The free offering includes up to 2 gigabytes of data, and the higher-end offering, for $60 a year, stores up to 25 gigabytes of data and makes a back-up copy once a week.

The company is planning to announce a $4.5 million funding round this week, led by two Cambridge investors: David Orfao of General Catalyst Partners and Rich Levandov of Avalon Ventures. (That’s on top of just over $1 million the company raised previously.)

When Web-based services like QuickBooks go down temporarily, or the note-taking service Evernote loses some customer data, that highlights the downside of storing data on someone else’s servers.

But Backupify’s chief executive, Rob May, says that when someone has an experience that makes him or her grateful for having signed up with his company, it’s usually related to user error. In other words, something important has been accidentally deleted.

Backupify can stash a copy of data from services like Blogger, Photobucket, and Gmail.

The company is working to make its backups of Facebook content, like a company’s Fan Page, more complete, and May says that a link to SalesForce.com, the Web-based customer relationship management system, is in the works.

Backupify has three employees in Louisville and seven in Cambridge, where it plans to hire a few more people this year.

May says one reason that the Boston area was more attractive than New York or San Francisco is that many potential buyers and distribution partners are here.

That includes companies such as EMC Corp. in Hopkinton, Boston-based Iron Mountain Inc., and Carbonite Inc., also of Boston.

In the case of Moontoast, the second scenario is playing out.

Its new chief executive, Blair Heavey, is subletting space for the company in Andover, and cofounder Marcus Whitney has moved north from Nashville.

The company is also hiring for marketing, infrastructure, and user-experience positions.

The “social commerce’’ start-up aims to make it easier for entertainment and media companies to find fans of their properties online; deliver content; and, ideally, entice them to buy stuff.

“It’s a huge pain for a musician or a magazine to be able to keep fans and subscribers engaged both on their own sites and throughout social-media sites,’’ Heavey says.

“And they also have revenue problems. They want to be able to monetize their content, wherever a fan base is, with things like exclusive offers and special member benefits.’’

Last month, Moontoast unveiled a partnership with Big Machine Records, a Nashville label whose roster includes Rascal Flatts, Trisha Yearwood, and Taylor Swift.

Heavey says the company has funding commitments of up to $5 million, but that it has been collecting seed money about $1 million at a time.

Investors so far include country music stars Vince Gill and Wynona Judd, according to Venture Nashville.

Heavey, an early executive at OpenMarket, the pioneering Cambridge e-commerce company, says Moontoast plans to maintain an engineering presence in Nashville, where about seven people work.

■ Technology Review’s collection of 35 important innovators under the age of 35 includes Boston-area folks like Richard Tibbetts, chief technology officer of StreamBase Systems, and danah boyd, a researcher at Microsoft Research New England who looks at how people interact on social networks (and who prefers to render her name without capital letters).

■ On Inc. magazine’s list of the 5,000 fastest-growing companies in the United States, 184 are based in the Boston area.

The two highest-ranking companies here are Carbonite, the online data backup service (11,208 percent growth over the past three years), and Gazelle (7,120 percent growth over that period), which buys and resells older consumer electronics.

■ Analog Devices founder Ray Stata and Analogic founder Bernard Gordon are on the 15th annual Mass High Tech All-Stars list, as is the outgoing president of MITX, Kiki Mills.

■ Boston topped the 2010 Innovation Cities list, put together by the Australian research and consulting company 2thinknow.

Rounding out the top five cities “to live, work and play, due to their strong innovation economics,’’ are Paris, Amsterdam, Vienna, and New York.

For the full Innovation Economy blog, updated daily, visit www.boston.com/innovation.