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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?"
Then the gov't will back it all up for you! Easy.
Haida Manga
Once you get all your data back, buy a Mac, subscribe to MobileMe and be safe, knowing that all your data is in the safe hands of a single compa...
Oh wait.
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
google's redundancy is legendary. why bother?
i can see if they maybe canceled a service or somesuch, but that's highly unlikely, especially for their more popular stuff. (spreadsheets, email, pictures)
i can understand the urge to keep it all local, but with their diversity, it's much more safe in their "cloud" than it would be at my house...
I don't know ... Google it
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?
File -> "Save As..."
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Use the Google services only where necessary. We've been doing this for a company I've started, but we only put documents and information on Google's services while we need it there. Not only is all our data on our backup server, but we only put data on their servers while it's needed. Visiting customer sites, etc.
In addition, isn't this the kind of thing that makes laptops so great? Bring it with you! There are tons of sharing apps about for various uses. Use a VPN and sshfs for remote file access. Use iCal/whatever to sync with your google calendar. That sort of thing.
In short, slowly migrate to a safer solution you're in more control of. You may lose a bit of your convenience, but safe data is worth it, in my opinion.
What part of Sarbanes-Oxley requires they backup data that has nothing to do with their finances? I think you don't know what you're talking about. SOx is very much misinterpreted, and you're only continuing the trend.
As a long-time computer user, and committed pessimist, I'd have hoped you'd think about backups long before you placed all your trust in the cloud.
... once enough people become dependent on the cloud, they will announce it will become a paid service the following week.
... like the body or the subject!) Erm, you mean you can't detect which it is ???
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
Does This 'Ask Slashdot' have the air of a troll to anyone else? It's like the questioner is serving it up so that every Google-hating/privacy-loving/I-told-you-so'er can go *apeshit* on it.
[17] Leary, T., White, C., Wood, P. R., Bhabha, W. D., and Wirth, N. Lambda calculus considered harmful. In Proceedings
Google does NOT have your backups. They have redundancy in their data storage, but when their servers get the command to delete something, it gets deleted everywhere, permanently!
See their own faq: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=50208
> Google has their own backups I am sure.
What makes you think that they back up the users' data? (Note: users, not customers.)
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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.
Use Outlook and connect to GMAIL through IMAP, then save off your email to a .PST file via the Import/Export tool.
-M
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!
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.
First, Google did not 'take over' your life or your data. You willingly gave it to them and, now that you find yourself a bit worried about the implications of one company having all of your data, you are trying to paint them as some sort of evil entity that cajoled and nearly forced you to turn over your data to them.
They didn't.
Take responsibility for your decision to hand over your data. Just because a service or company is cool and sexy doesn't give them any special powers to make you do anything. Google included.
Now, as to backing up your data, I'm not sure what the problem is. Google isn't holding your data hostage at all. With the exception of maybe Notes, you can get your data from Google to your local machine pretty easy:
Email: setup a POP3 client and download all your mail to your machine from GMail.
Documents: Go to FILE->DOWNLOAD AS and export each document to a file on your hard disk.
Reader: Spend some time looking at each feeds URL and bring them into a desktop feed reader.
Calendar: Find a tool (and there are some, I just can't think of the name now) that will allow you to bring Google Calendar data off of the server and into a local app.
The truth is you are not a slave to Google. You can leave anytime you want. That doesn't mean it's not going to take a little work on your end to do so but, then, why shouldn't it? YOU chose to go 100% with Google (as many of us have including me) and it isn't Googles responsibility to make it super simple for you to up and leave.
Anthony Papillion
Advanced Data Concepts, Inc.
"Quality Custom Software and IT Services"
My friend tried to get special permission to publish a figure that had a Google Map screenshot in his Ph.D thesis. If you read the T&C on maps you're not technically allowed to publish such things.
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?
I wonder precisely what promises Google has made and what responsibilities have they disclaimed themselves of? As any business school graduate knows, one of the keys to keeping customers is to make it easy to start with them but tough to leave.
Does Google owe any level of data integrity and privacy? Do they owe return of user data without claiming rights to use it otherwise? Do they make any promise of data protection and disaster recovery? What due diligence does the use owe in the process?
As we move to an environment where more and more people simply 'trust" corporations to hold and protect their (potentially personal) data, I fear that we're way ahead of the law in defining the rights and responsibilities of both users and providers. In the absence of law, providers, such as Google, will write naturally terms of use that mostly benefit themselves. Users will simply lose.
I'm personally excepting to Conduit to fulfill my needs in backing up from different sites. Of course synchronizing is different from backing up, but when I have all the data on my local machine I can backup those easily.
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.
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.
Now how do I get the prosecutor to return those backups to me?
fencepost
just a little off
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.
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.
"Laugh while you can a-monkey boy!" - Dr Emilio Lizardo
POP3
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.