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Google Has All My Data – How Do I Back It Up?
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?"
Gbackup, of course! Well OK, not yer, but apparently coming soon. If you need it now, um, Google is your friend. And there's more, if you check Google.
And BTW, web apps != "the cloud".
Caveat Utilitor
But Google solutions tend to at least support established open standards.
That is: You can archive your Gmail account via IMAP. You can probably download your Google Calendar appointments as an iCal file. While I'm not sure of the best way to automate it, all of your documents in Google Docs are available in OpenDocument.
Still, these are all "some assembly required".
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Thunderbird can back up gmail, and the Zindus extension will back up you address book. Lifehacker had a story in the past month about using wget to backup your del.icio.us bookmarks; I presume it can be adapted to Googlepages and your blog. Finally, if you install Google Gears, a lot of content will be cached on your laptop. I don't know how you'd retrieve it, but at least you'd know where it was.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
The only data S-O requires Google to back up is their own financial data. They have no legal obligation whatsoever to the users of their free services. They could delete all of the OP's data right now for any reason or none and he would have no recourse.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
both of those cases are over 2 years ago, when gmail was "truly" in beta.
and every single app i've seen from google allows for personal backup of one type or another.
there is no single solution, but every individual file is accessible and usually in useful non-locked formats that are easily manipulated.
i agree this feature would be nice to have, but it's not really good business sense to do that... your not making it easy for your customer to leave you? (duh)
but with google it's at least possible.
There's also notMac, which replaces .Mac.
For context, click Parent.
Ewww... Outlook? PST file?! I think you're on the wrong site.
Is there a one-touch solution that will take all my data from the various online apps and archive it on my home server?"
no.
I use http://www.gmail-backup.com/ to backup my gmail accounts. It works with regular gmail and google apps gmail. It has a click and backup view, but I use the cmd line interface to automate a daily backup of all my mail and labels to a folder as .eml files. It also lets you restore to gmail if needed. It has a few quirks, but over all is very useful.
Sig!
That's not true and you know it. It'd be a waste to do that on their end. I highly doubt it gets securely wiped, and I'm guessing it's only a few references that get set to NULL or somesuch and the data still exists. And if they have tape backups, well, obviously they're not going to pull those out and wipe those every time you delete an old email.
So completely gone? No, getting rid of something permanently on the internet (not just on Google) is hard, close to impossible. What Google is basically saying is that when you delete something, don't cry to them to get it back, it's as much an effort to truly delete all traces of something as it is to actually restore it. If they aren't going to pull out tapes to delete your emails, they won't do it to recover them. If they aren't going to waste CPU/IO on deleting every single disparate copy of your email, they aren't going to waste CPU/IO trying to recover it.
Documents - Use "offline access for Google Docs"
Contacts - export to CSV or vCard
calendar - export it as a private address in ical format (also XML, html)
blogs - HTTracker
photos - try picasa
what else?
Google Docs Offline If the 'cloud' explodes, I guess you can open your Docs offline folder with a web browser, and save the documents as OO, HTML, etc. Other folks have posted about using IMAP to get your email, etc.
POP3