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Google’s Gmail Fiasco: Backing Up Data

The Gmail fiasco on Sunday raises an important issue. Our increasing dependence on Google and other cloud service providers without any kind of backup needs some serious scrutiny.
Wed, 03/02/2011 - 23:03 by Anter Prakash Singh
An effective backup plan is your security in case a cloud service provider fails to protect your data on any of its application.

The Sunday episode, in which tens of thousands of Gmail users lost their e-mails and other data, will soon be forgotten, and Google is hopeful of restoring all the accounts soon.

Having an effective backup plan is your protection against the loss of any data in case a service provider fails to protect your data on its application. Popular applications being offered by cloud based service providers like Twitter, Facebook, Picasa, Microsoft Office Live, etc., are being used increasingly in our daily computing and the importance of having a backup plan is becoming all the more necessary.

Need for backup
Today the use of cloud-based tools is dominating the way we communicate and work, and applications like Facebook, Twitter, MS Office Live, Wordpress, Blogger, Tumblr, Picasa, and many more are being used commonly.

The list is endless, but in the absence of a backup plan, any service provider offering free services would just say “sorry” in case of the lost data.

An effective backup plan is your security in case a cloud service provider fails you.

Here are some tips on backing up your data on popular internet applications.

E-Mail Backup
It is easy to create a local backup of emails by using a POP3/IMAP email client like Mozilla Thunderbird, Windows Live Mail or Apple’s Mail app. The users can also fire up their desktop program once in a while, and can store a majority of their emails offline also.

After the Sunday’s episode, Google plans to offer Google Apps users disk space on rent, ranging from 20 GB to 1 TB. The price will be $5 to $256 for one year.

The extra storage space can be used for storing data from services like Google Docs, Blogger, or Picasa. The extra space, however, cannot be used for storing mails.

Backup for Other Services
It is a good idea to save your blog posts on hard drive before posting them. There are several blog writing programs, compatible with some popular blogging platforms like Blogger, Tumblr, or Wordpress.

Mac users can use MarsEdit or a similar program, which automatically saves a backup of every blog post written using the app.

Microsoft’s ‘Windows Live Writer’ saves all the posts written using the program in a file called ‘My Weblogs Posts’ in your Documents folder. The earlier posts can also be downloaded to this file by using its export feature.

Facebook is also offering a feature that allows the users to export almost all the Facebook data into a ZIP file. Users just need to go to Facebook’s export tool and download it. An email alerts the user when the file is ready to be downloaded.

It should be done on a regular basis and even comes in handy if at any stage the user decides to leave Facebook as moving the data becomes easier.

Twitter users can use free services like TweetBackup and Tweet Scan Backup that allow users to export tweets to their desktop. However, these services only allow a limited number of Tweets to be grabbed at a time, and it is a good idea to back up your tweets before reaching near the limit.

It is necessary to backup all your data locally when using these web-based services.

Last edited by Harpreet Bhagrath on Wed, 03/02/2011 - 23:46 | Write to author: Anter Prakash Singh | Bookmark and Share