A user kindly pointed out that domain names that contain hyphens were not being backed up correctly. On investigation we noted that Amazon support all sorts of odd characters (in addition to the not-so-odd-hyphen) in domain names and we were not correctly applying the quoting rules that are required in such circumstances.
We have updated the code and rolled out the new version.
We've just made it easier to register for a free account of our SimpleDB backup solution by relaxing the requirement to gather your AWS credentials at the sign up stage. Now you can register for an account but only enter your details when you want to, plus you can purge your credentials from our systems whenever you like - if you prefer after every backup has been completed.
As a side issue, we have fixed a small display bug where an error pertaining to missing credentials was being displayed in the browser as a raw error message rather than being trapped in our code and presented more appropriately.
We're pleased to announce the release of the API for BackupSDB so you can now initiate backups from your own scripts and see what backups and files you have etc.
The commands currently supported are
listbackups
backupdetails
backup
listbackups, not surprisingly, returns, as xml, a list of your most recent backups together with status information etc.
backupdetails gives you information about a particular backup, together with a list of the files on Amazon S3 that have been created as a result.
backup allows you to initiate the backup of a specified domain. Note that we deploy flood control to prevent the repeated backup of a domain within a short period of time. At present this time is 5 minutes.
For a document explaining how to use the API in detail, please email customerservices [at] mindsizzlers.com with BackupSDB API in your subject heading.
Thanks, and enjoy ...
To make your data more visible, we have just released a query browser that allows you to enter any SELECT query you would like to explore the results of. This is much more powerful than the old QueryWithAttributes method that some competing products still seem to be stuck with ;-)
While we were at it, we've added a feature so you can delete rows of data too. But be careful, you can't undo this so take care!
We have plans to extend the query browser into a fully fledged editor as we have that code available from another project, so if you would find that useful, please do let us know!
Since one of the reasons for developing this tool was to provide disaster recovery for when you accidentally delete a domain you meant to keep (admit it, we've probably all done it during testing at some stage), it's only logical that there should be a RESTORE complement to the BACKUP command.
Well, we've just written and deployed it!
Interestingly, because the RESTORE command has to be able to restore XML data it has no prior knowledge of, this potentially opens up some interesting data import options. We'll give that some thought for future updates.
Enjoy ... 
XML Feeds