I use Gmail for all of my personal email accounts. I also started using Google Docs for all of my word processing and spreadsheet needs and Google’s Calendar for keeping track of where I need to be.
Everything is going pretty well with that so far with a couple minor concerns that I will talk about at the end of my experiment at the end of January.
I read on Techcrunch about a problem a few people had with all of their Gmail emails getting deleted and there being very little possibility of retrieving the lost files.
This is one of my big concerns about storing my data online and using these types of services.
I have Thunderbird installed on my laptop and a copy of every email gets sent there, but if my Gmail account got purged, I don’t know of anyway that I could upload the emails from my laptop other than resending them to myself which would make me the sender of all of the emails. I also don’t know of anyway to setup Gmail to backup files to a independent location.
Google Docs lets you save each file to your local computer and if anything bad happened you could import those files but it appears that all of that happens on a file by file basis. I don’t see anyway to do a mass backup, mass import.
I am much more concerned with data redundancy right now than making sure that the Google Spreadsheet is 100% compatible with Excel. This is my data that I want to use with their service. I know the service is free, but that really isn’t an excuse for providing decent ways of letting me store my data locally and restore those files if something happens to the data on the Google servers.
Tags: Gmail, Google, Google Docs, data cloud
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