Learn From the Gmail Fiasco: You Need Redundant Copies of Your Email–Don’t Worry, It’s Painless :-)
Personal Productivity, SaaS February 28th, 2011
Cartoon by Dave Walker
A few hundred thousand (numbers range from 150k to 500K) Gmail and Google Apps users had the scary experience of losing ALL their email content yesterday. Their account was accidentally “reset”. Google acknowledged the error, and issued a statement that they are working on restoring “lost” content.
Let’s stop and think here a minute. Is your lifetime’s worth of information sitting in email? Do you have redundant backups / copies? (there is a difference, as we’ll see). If not… stop everything, and rush to fix it.
There are a few steps anyone can take easily to have redundant copies of their entire email account – I don’t mean just backup to restore from, but live copies you can switch to any time.
- Keep an offline copy in an email client. I don’t use email clients anymore, much prefer the native Gmail UI. But even if you don’t normally use email clients, you can still occasionally start Outlook, Thunderbird, Mac email…etc. Fetch everything via IMAP, then make redundant copies.
- Auto-copy to another Google account. Set up an account you won’t actively use – its sole purpose is to fetch email from all your other email accounts (Google or external) via POP and serve as an archive….
Tags: backup, CloudAve, data backup, email, Email client, gmail, Google, Google Account, google apps, hotmail, IMAP, Outlook, thunderbird, yahoo mail, zoho mail
A Real Floppy Discovery
Technology October 3rd, 2009
A little digging in an old cabinet today, and look what I’ve found. Oh, well, some of you Gen-Y-ers may not recognize it: it’s a 5.25” floppy disk. From the time they were really floppy. 
Disk and sleeve mismatched (3M in IBM), old media reused – the handwritten word “diploma” means this must be the diskette that has my University Thesis on it … probably in an early release WordStar fomat. (For the Y-ers, WordStar is a piece of computing history).
So all this means I have it and I don’t – highly unlikely I will ever be able to access it. It’s all my fault. I did not have my advice piece to follow back than.
Related post:
Tags: backup, CloudAve, data backup, data formats, Floppy disk, IBM, WordStar
Ma.Gnolia Data Loss – Is Your Data Safe?
SaaS January 30th, 2009
Ma.gnolia, a social bookmarking service is down, lost all their user data and they don’t know if / when they can recover.
This is as bad as it can get for any Web 2.0 service (and more importantly for users), and the backlash against Cloud services has already started. My first reaction is taking Stowe Boyd’s approach – a quick overview of how safe my own data is.
Update: also read Krish’s post @ ClouDave: Magnolia Effect – Should We Trust The Clouds?
Tags: backup, data backup, flickr, gmail, Google, live mesh, mozy, online backup, online sync, synchronization, syncplicity, web services, zoho
Zoli Erdos
