Flutterby™! : Gmail needs backups 2011-02-28 17:43:13.629763+00

Gmail needs backups

2011-02-28 17:43:13.629763+00 by Dan Lyke 7 comments

Google working on retrieving lost gmail messages. Alt version of the story. /. thread.

Careful about relying entirely on that cloud, folks...

I have t'bird set up for off line access. As I understand it, if something is deleted in the cloud then it will be deleted off line as well the next time the two synch. In this case, if the account was deleted, I guess I'd be safe until I logged on again at that same account.

Andy: Depends on how you have Thunderbird setup. Typically IMAP doesn't use local storage. If that's how you are using it, Google losing your data would result in you're not being able to access the email.

Note that Google didn't lose any email. There was a period where they had to restore data for some users, but it wasn't lost.

naive question here: I use Thunderbird as a IMAP client for my gmail. Would Google's losing my account in this fashion result in the loss of my local mailbox?

Yeah. I'm looking at moving to Gmail generally. Email backup is a sonofabitch because I don't necessarily want full backup. Whatever I come up with will probably be fairly simple and involve Fetchmail mirroring the IMAP.

And Google has been providing regular status updates. I'm looking forward to the post-mortem.

Does this mean I need local backups of my mail? Not sure. Does this create an opportunity? Ya betcha! Someone's probably already cobbled together an IMAP-based solution that'll provide fail-over in case of a GMail failure. Of course, you'd probably have to be using a domain other than gmail.com that you normally forward into your Gmail account.

The only problem is that such a backup service would cost about the same as paying for a regular email account somewhere. So what's the benefit of Gmail? Actually there are many which would become obvious when you ran from the "backup service" having to deal with something like SquirrelMail, CubeMail or IMP.

Yeah, what it says to me is that reliance on a cloud service doesn't obviate my need for backups.

#Comment Re: made: 2011-03-01 00:38:28.649728+00 by: ebradway [edit history]

And the difference is: Google is having to bust their asses to restore the data. Not me!