Google Has All My Data – How Do I Back It Up? 215
shadeshope writes "Slowly but surely Google has taken over my computing life. How can I back it up?
Bit by bit with their mantra, hip image and brilliant services, Google has gained my trust and all my data. I am doing almost all of my computing in the cloud. Google Reader, Calender, Email, Docs and Notes have become my tools of choice; even to the point where my day book, research notes, etc., are all on Google's servers. It was just so easy, enabling me to effortlessly work from multiple computers, operating systems and locations. I know, I know, this is foolish — all my eggs are firmly in one basket. It has crept up on me. As a long-time computer user and committed pessimist, I have used many schemes over the years to ensure my data is safe. Now I have ceded all control to Google. How can I regain some control and back this all up? Is there a one-touch solution that will take all my data from the various online apps and archive it on my home server?"
Cloud Addiction (Score:5, Interesting)
This is exactly the model that all clouds will eventually mutate into
Your eggs, Google's basket.
Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment
Re:why back up (Score:4, Interesting)
> Google has their own backups I am sure.
What makes you think that they back up the users' data? (Note: users, not customers.)
Re:why bother? (Score:3, Interesting)
Right, and not to mention that time that they had an error and a lot of people really did lose messages.
Personally, I don't keep anything vital on google services except email. The email gets backed up via imap periodically.
This works fine for me because I don't usually have items that I'd be upset about losing, most of the things I do have are not sent over email or are easily backed up individually.
Backing up email (Score:3, Interesting)
Use Outlook and connect to GMAIL through IMAP, then save off your email to a .PST file via the Import/Export tool.
-M
Re:Ask Slashdot Troll ? (Score:4, Interesting)
Has anyone asked Google for a restore? (Score:3, Interesting)
If I delete something at work, and then six months later think 'whatever happened to that file?', there's a chance it'll be on our backup archive and I can get it back. Or I can roll back to any of the last week's daily backups. Can Google do that? Has anyone tried? Does it keep versions?
They seem to encourage you to not delete anything, but that doesn't help with undoing several revisions of a document, does it?
I'm not a big google docs user, so I might have missed this somewhere.
Re:Easy! (Score:5, Interesting)
It might enable them to regain control of their future data. But they have almost certainly lost control of their current data.
About the only way of retaining control over your data whilst having a third party store it would be if you encrypt in such a way that that party will never have access to anything other than the cyphertext. Which has the side effect that you can't process that data with web based apps.
Re:why bother? (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe a better argument is for company-level control of user information rather than just user-level backups. If an employee deletes all of their e-mail, the company can't comply with document retention requirements. Likewise, deleting a user eliminates all of their data with no backup recourse.
For e-mail, I imagine what you have to do is migrate service from gmail to positini (google subsidiary) to get the added functionality.
Re:Customer Service? (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyways, the result that he found was that Google doesn't *have* a phone number. Their buildings and offices do, their sales people do, but I can almost guarantee that there is no "getting to a person" for any query you might have from a technical or legal standpoint.
I guess.. on that note, have you tried posting in the relevant Google groups?
Conduit or other synchronization software (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not very keen in using Google or any other services for my calendar, contacts, photos etc. data. If I'll think I'll need on-the-fly syncing, I'll rather just setup a sync server on my home server.
Re:Not sure about one-touch... (Score:2, Interesting)
"But Google solutions tend to at least support established open standards."
Oh really? [blogspot.com]. You must have a new definition of 'standards'.
several solutions (Score:3, Interesting)
Mail and Calendar, you can simply back up by subscribing to them using IMAP/POP and iCal.
Google Sites, you can kind of backup with wget; just make a copy of the site from a cron job.
For Google Docs, you can use Gears; it won't be a full backup, but it will have local copies of the most important documents, and you can cut-and-paste out of that in a pinch.
In the long term, something like Gnome Conduit will probably solve this problem once and for all; until then, one just has to muddle through.
All your data are belong to us (Score:2, Interesting)
I find that things like Picassa are OK because these are only copies of your digital stuff at home. But even then, your comments, captions and arrangements would, it seems belong to them.
Re:why back up (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm saying that if that if the Sheriff, well, to be honest, the FBI rolls in, and says, we're taking these backup tapes, then they'll have it. Not deleted.
But if you roll in and say, hey, I want my old emails, they'll say, sorry, no, we have no way of giving you just your old emails back in a timely manner.
That said, Google has resisted what it correctly considered to be unlawful demands for information.