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Glitch Has Users Fuming, Google 'Frantic'
netbuzz writes "A problem with Google's Personalized Home Page feature has apparently cost a lot of users their carefully crafted doors to the Internet. And Google, which says it is frantically searching for a fix, also acknowledges that it is not sure if it will be able to recover the lost settings. 'The problem is the latest in what seems a regular stream of technical glitches and availability problems affecting Google's online services. In the past six months, Google services like Blogger, Gmail and Google Apps have all experienced significant technical issues that have left users fuming. The problems highlight one of the risks of relying on hosted applications providers, which offer to house software and its data for individuals and organizations. Google is one of the biggest cheerleaders for this software provisioning model, which many see as a viable option to the traditional approach of having users install applications on their own PCs and servers.'"
... for not having to manage, install or roll-out this software. It saves time when setting up, but that time is possible then transferred to when the thing breaks. Not that in-house software breaks, but I guess at least then it's up to you to fix it, as opposed to some guys in a fancy building half-way around the world.
"Every google app has the option of downloading a local backup". Not the personalized pages.
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WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
losing. How frigging hard is it to type LOSING instead of LOOSING?
why storing all your data on some company's servers is a good idea?
While I agree that keeping local backups will prevent the frustration felt when remote servers lose your data, there is a convenience factor of being able to access your data from anywhere. Two examples:
GMail: I like the idea of being able to access my email everywhere I have an Internet connection. It's also a nice file transfer mechanism. If I need a file at work, I email it to my gmail account and then download it at work.
QuickBooks: My stepfather has his own business. He used quickbooks and found that it met his needs, was easy enough for him to use and, most importantly, he was familiar with it. When he hired on a few managers to help out with his growing business, he realized that giving them each their own copy was not only expensive, but they would would constantly be trying to reconcile and replicate all the data entered by each of them to each of their own systems. This could become a huge hassle for the three employees he had and would only get worse as more are hired on. With QuickBooks online, everyone has access the same data at the same time from different locations and since there is only one database, no replication is required. Of course, he keeps local hard copies of everything in the event of an Intuit disaster.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
When something goes wrong on your desktop you have control. You can work around it. You decide when to upgrade the hardware and software. I haven't lost much in Office for a long time because I know it's quirks and work around it.
By contrast when Google groups suddenly started eating all my usenet posts the other day while falsely showing they were being posted, then stopped showing new Usenet messages, I was borked. There was nothing I could do. It's still borked by the way and I'm totally at their mercy.
Now when you say Google are responsive about it all, what do you mean? I can't get a reply for one from one of their staff for a problem I experience. If the problem isn't being had by a large number of people I can guarantee I'll be ignored.
I don't understand how someone can say with a straight face that it's no different with remote apps. Even more puzzling is how it gets modded insightful.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Hey can we mod the summary as -1 Troll?
[17] Leary, T., White, C., Wood, P. R., Bhabha, W. D., and Wirth, N. Lambda calculus considered harmful. In Proceedings
No, I'm guessing they don't do any backups in the sense you're talking about, like with tapes. Something tells me they just have too much data spread over a huge number of disparate fiefdoms (YouTube, Gmail, Groups, Blogger, PicasaWeb, to name a few) to make it feasible. Probably everything is mirrored across two or more geographically distinct locations and that's it. As with any mirroring solution (RAID1), this protects you against hardware failure but not accidental deletion.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Wait right click save html is broken?
Seems to me that should be enough to recreate it, obviously you don't have the backend but it sounds like they were mostly produced by the service and can be recreated by the service.
This may be a generalization but people doing cool stuff with css2 and mySql probably aren't using Google's free service for hosting.