Well at Least the Cookie Lasts Until 2038

From that blog post:

I have over 300mb of CRUCIAL data in my email, none of which I have backups for.

See, that's what I don't understand about all this gmail excitement. If your email is that important, why are you not downloading it to your own machine?

I imagine that asking an email program to handle 300MB (which I have a hard time fathoming) might be difficult, but relying on someone else to protect your important information just does not sound reasonable to me.

You're as likely to lose data from your own hard drive as from any service provider, maybe even more likely. Never had a hard drive crash? Backing up Gmail by downloading copies of everything to your hard drive is good practice, but the greater point is to have a backup of your important data wherever the primary location of that data may be.

True. One assumes, though, that you always back up your hard drive as well.

From Gmail home page:

I read through the FAQs etc. and didn't see any instructions or recomendations to back up files locally, to the contary it reads like "bullet proof" storage.

Blame the user for believing Google, not for neglecting backup. GMail could easily add "BACK UP YOUR EMAILS ON YOUR MACHINE" but I guess that would send a mixed message, don't want to confuse the poor users now would we?

I see the viral marketing crew is all over this one posting on every topical blog with the message:"the user is stooopid, google is good".

go viral!

Using free email to avoid spam and such when signing up for various internet services is about all it's good for IMO.

If you have things you need in your email, things you depend upon, and let a 3rd party store them it's pure insanity as the value to YOU may be high but it's just a few megabytes of data to them.

FWIW, When I ran a hosting firm a few years back and spam was getting really bad we told customers point blank DO NOT save mail on the server as we only did backups of websites, not email, that we were a hosting company and not a storage service, and if the server had to be replaced all stored email would be lost.

I keep all important email documents on my personal computer and back it up myself so if I lose anything I have only myself to blame.

Leaving any email elsewhere, where it's stored forever within reach of a subpoena for what purpose you can't even fathom at the moment, divorce? business dissolution? whatever could also come back to bite you.

It's just a bad idea all around, don't do it.

Absolutely agree. We host our own mail and I STILL tell the users that they are crazy to leave anything important on the server. It's fine to leave it up for web access but only after they've pulled a copy to their desktop.

Conversely, recently, the folder on my hard drive holding one client's emails for the last 4+ years suddenly got corrupted. I guessed I could have lived without it, but didn't want to. But -aha!- I had a backup on my external drive, did the drag/drop thing, and it was restored.

Really, with very large (420GB) external USB/Firewire hard drives running a few hundred dollars, there's no real reason not to do backups. These are actual hard drives, not CD or DVD burners, so it's quite fast and wonderful.

very large (420GB) external USB/Firewire hard drives running a few hundred dollars, there's no real reason not to do backups.

Lifehacker or somebody did a review of syncback (free ver). I'm using that. One-click selective backup to the maxtor

http://2brightsparks.com/freeware/freeware-hub.html

Hi rc. Cool. I'm using a Western Digital drive (from New Egg). The latest appears to be 400Gig for $264.

Not using any sync software, though yours sounds good.

Synching software is also nutty to some degree as you can easily synch a corrupted file and have 2 copies of crap. You need rotating backups for anything worth keeping and a periodic permanent copy on a CD or DVD just in case.

FWIW, data corruption in this day and age is just silly as the loss should be minimal and easily recoverable except for a few damaged chunks of data in any file, especially an email folder. I did a lot of data integrity research back in the early 80s and designed a database that was about as fault tolerant as possible, and could even detect and report missing sectors of data when the hard drive lost a track then fix itself to work around the missing data in case your backup was bad as well.

Shame people are still sloppy designing files as the data overhead was miniscule to implement such techniques.

You guys missed the best part!
You gotta love day 22 on Lenssen's blog
http://blog.outer-court.com/forum/22209.html

It's like the alien's are attacking and taking out each country they hit. Pure classic entertainment!

All these Digg script kiddies are ragging on Bob for not doing a backup and the system starts to crash..

"It seems that Gmail is completely down at the moment (at least for me down in France)"

"Completely down for me in California at the moment too."

"I am getting the same server is down message but the funny thing is I can access it via outlook express. I guess just the web access is down. Weird"

"Here in the UK too. Probably buckling the strain of everyone backing up their inbox via POP!"

"gmail is falling apart."

Panic in the streets! Cats and Dogs falling from the heavens!, and suddenly Bob isn't as stupid as he seemed. Great Stuff..better than Ghostbusters man! Never laughed so hard in my life.

Synching software is also nutty

Yeah, I disabled sync and just copy out to the flash drive. I don't delete files on the external drive that are deleted on the desktop either.

Diane, get 2 more drives, preferably identical to the one you have so the dc powerpak is the same. Every month or so, rotate the external drives to the house or another physical location.

Here's a nice thing from Microsoft. Yes, that's right, a really nice piece of software that just does what it should and does that excellently.

From Microsoft: Sync Toy

I'm sure it can't BU from Gmail, but it syncs (sync: more advanced than just backup) any folder with any folder, including thumb drives and mp3 players.