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This actually raises a slightly terrifying reality. How much would someone have to pay you to never again recover your gMail account? I would demand just an a
by pkfrank 13y ago
This actually raises a slightly terrifying reality.
How much would someone have to pay you to never again recover your gMail account? I would demand just an absurd payout to willingly walk away right now, with all those contacts, messages, unread e-mails, organization, etc...
Scary how much faith we put in this free service.
- coolsunglasses 13y agoI could drop it without too much pain, honestly. It wouldn't cost that much for me to delete my gmail accounts. But I learned to own my data where it matters and not sweat the rest ages ago. (Stopped compulsively "hoarding")
- sebastianavina 13y agothe problem resides on big companies. I use google apps for email, and it's almost impossible to backup all the mails..
- wutbrodo 13y agohttp://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/google-announces-data-export-feature-for-gmail-google-calendar-data/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/google... is adequate for me. What's so devastatingly wrong about that feature that makes it "almost impossible" to use?
- mburns 13y agoDoes IMAP not work for you?
- prawks 13y agoThanks for reminding me to backup!
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- chmars 13y agoUsing Gmail is no reason to ignore the necessity of a local backup. I use CloudPull (OS X, payware). And please note that Gmail is not free for everyone, there are many Google Apps users.
- ebcase 13y ago+1 for CloudPull — it's a fantastic product.
- umsm 13y agoEach one of us has the power to do something about it: Perform a Backup. We should be downloading our mailbox with our contacts on a regular basis. I'm guilty for not doing this, but seems like an area that can use a SaaS.
- szx 13y agoYour contacts' email addresses (or at least most of mine) wouldn't do you much good if everybody left gmail all of a sudden.
- dgesang 13y agoAlso, backing up Emails is super simple, just fire up any mail client ...
- vacri 13y agoI got this error while trying to do a manual backup of a company mailbox :) One day I'll have the time to write that script manually
- amatix 13y agohttps://www.backupify.com/ https://www.backupify.com/ do this for Google Apps - works pretty well.
- blowski 13y agoWe use Backupify at TechHub. It works great.
- ryanmcbride 13y agoYou should always use a backup service, and don't keep files "in the cloud" when you can help it. The goal is to have any single part of your digital life able to vanish, without losing anything important.
- spyder 13y agoThe most painful thing is to change your e-mail in the services where you used it for sign up. The data export doesn't look hard: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/google-announces-data-export-feature-for-gmail-google-calendar-data/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/google...
- fletchowns 13y agoThat's why you use Google Apps for Domain with a domain name you have control over. That way you can switch providers but keep the same email address.
- jader201 13y agoThis is exactly why I've abstracted my Gmail accounts behind my own personal domain. If Gmail starts charging/gets shut down/I get tired of it, I can switch over to another email provider that supports custom MX domains. I (almost [1]) never use my actual Gmail address. [1] The only time I use it is for Google services (i.e. Adsense) that require a Gmail account.
- TinyTimZamboni 13y agoI once talked to someone who woke up one day and all their gmail data was gone. They called customer service and were informed that Google has no obligation to be dependable since it's a free service.
- Casseres 13y agoThey called customer service? I thought that was available for paid subscriptions. You should ask that someone what phone number he/she used.
- yarone 13y agoI pay backupify.com $5 per month to backup my gmail, gcal, gdocs, etc.
- azth 13y agoDo you trust their security?
- hyperbovine 13y agoAre you comfortable with Google data mining your secrets to sell ads?
- blisterpeanuts 13y agoHm, $60 a year... that would buy you a 500 gig or 1 Tb external drive every year. Google now provides a backup feature so you could download your gmail/contacts/etc as one giant zip, then rsync it off to a couple of external drives and you have one less middleman to worry about leaking your data or going out of business and losing your backups.
- swalsh 13y agoThe crazy thing is, the email means less to me than the chat logs. Maybe 60% of the words i've ever said to my wife have been over gchat while we're at work.
- sentenza 13y agoWere they the most important words you say to her, though? Most of humanity has constantly been forgetting most of the conversation they've had with their loved ones. Maybe it is not reasonable to try to hold on to the literal incarnation of daily banalities.
- swalsh 13y agoWhat's important? I guess when I proposed, we were in the middle of Venice, so that wasn't recorded. But when we came up with the name for our dog it was. My mom got hit by a car once, I think I told her over chat. I don't see any emotional difference between chat and in person. But I can understand that some people do.
- hueving 13y agoBut the point is that it might not be necessary to record those conversations, even though they were large life events. Why do you need to re-read the transcript of you telling your wife that your mom got hit by a car?
- untog 13y agoBut I think the point the OP was saying is that until a few years ago no-one saved those moments. And everyone survived just fine. It's like an extension of everyone photographing every single moment of their life just because they can. Are you really going to look back over the chat log for naming your dog?
- vacri 13y agoDo you actually go back and relive those moments? Do you ever go back and look over the moment when you talked about your mother's accident? Chat history is useful for me if I was talking to a friend about a technical problem and want to review the conclusion or possible link. I've never personally delved into chat history for any other reason (perhaps a funny photo link). I've had some hilariously fun conversations on chat, but never felt the desire to relive them. I guess I'm saying if you don't actually revisit your chat history, there's really no need to feel so attached.
- lazyjones 13y agoSeriously, what keeps you people from at least making occasional backups via IMAP? Do you like the risk associated with what you're doing?
- macNchz 13y agoMaybe I'm unusual, but I wouldn't be terribly upset if my two gmail accounts (totaling 6gb of stuff) were wiped clean. I'm always at 'inbox zero', so everything is really just an archive. Anyone I have in my contacts whose email address is unavailable to me elsewhere is probably not someone I'm going to be contacting, anyway, and I never, ever look at chat logs. All in I'd probably let it go for a couple hundred bucks.
- panarky 13y agoMore terrifying is that it's not just email. While Gmail was down I couldn't view or edit documents in Drive. And I also lost control of my Google Compute Engine instances, apparently since the gcutil application couldn't authenticate with my Google account.
- scholia 13y agoIt's very risky to put all your eggs in one basket. Why not spread stuff around?
- josephlord 13y agoThere is a trade off between availability (spread it around) and privacy/confidentiality (the more places it is spread the more you are exposed to risks of hacking or insiders at any of the companies). There is no right answer but it depends on the person and the content.
- scholia 13y agoI think you greatly reduce your risk by spreading it around. There cases where people have had a single Google or Apple account compromised and lost everything. That wouldn't have happened if their stuff had been distributed... though you'd still be in trouble with an email account hack, because of password resets and passwords sent in plain text emails.
- josephlord 13y ago> I think you greatly reduce your risk by spreading it around. That only applies if loss of data/access to data is a greater problem for you than exposure of the data. Spreading it into multiple locations/services gives more choices for an attacker to breach to expose it and they only need to get into one of them.
- scholia 13y agoNo. It's not the same data, it's about using different sites for different services. If you have six and one gets hacked, the other five are still secure. If you use the same site for everything, that probably increases the risk of being hacked (because a single site gives your activity more exposure), and when you are hacked, you lose all your data, not just 1/6th.
- ratscabies 13y agoI'd say about tree fiddy.
- bborud 13y agoI predict that in the year 2032, when Gmail has gone bust and some russian gangster has bought the remains, the new business model of Google will be ransom: you pay us some portion of your net income last year or we publish all your emails. Joking aside: what happens when companies that are sitting on huge chunks of extremely private data change owners and the new owners are unburdened by conscience?
- scholia 13y agoSimple solution: get an Outlook.com account and get it to collect all your Gmail. Use Gmail forwarding to forward all incoming emails to your Outlook.com account, and bcc copies of outgoing mail. You now have an off-site backup. Install a desktop client and download all your Gmail using IMAP. You now have an on-site backup, and you can use your client to send emails via Outlook.com. It's not hard. Anybody could do this.
- blisterpeanuts 13y agoGmail is just a front end for my domain name and web hosting provider's mail services. I can usually use SquirrelMail to read/respond if for some reason gmail is unreachable. I also like that I have the option to easily switch to another front end if gmail gets too annoying or NSA-snoopy.