Recently I came across this interesting article on Lifehacker:

Do You Back Up Your Web Networking Life?

I thought the article and comments were very interesting, and it got me to thinking about all of the places one might have information stored on the web. Granted, sites like MySpace and Facebook probably don’t contain important business information, but what about places like LinkedIn? If you have recommendations and other interaction from people, you probably don’t want to lose that information should something happen to LinkedIn.

I looked around and did find an “Export Connections” link which allows you to download your contacts on LinkedIn. But what about all the other data? You would probably want to keep your recommendations and profile as well. To get a copy, go to your “View my profile as others see it” page and then use your browser’s “Save as…” feature to download the information to your computer (usually found in the File menu). This way, you have a copy of the text on the page and could use it to rebuild, if needed. Another method of backing up your information is to use the “Save as PDF” feature of LinkedIn. This is not nearly as complete, though. But it could help, so what the heck… it only takes a minute and could save you some measure of work.