Shuai Quan 权
Experienced Marketing Professional in US-China Business & International Culture Exchange Programs
How do you archive/back up all your online data, like Gmail, Yahoo, Facebook...
I'm trying to back up all my emails, Gmail documents, my profile data (chat, status & friend lists) on Facebook. I simply found it difficult to back up all of these my own data. Any tips?
Clarification added 8 months ago:
Oleksiy pointed out an interesting point. I guess my question should be: should we archive all of our online data or not. If yes, how?
Personally, I love to put my data in the cloud for easy access. I want to trust Google/Yahoo/Facebook or other websites to securely hold my data, but I still can't afford losing any of my memories possibly (my photo with family, my facebook stories and chats...). These are simply too important to take any risk of losing them...I would like to know your thoughts too :)
Good Answers (3)
Saso L
Technical Director at Netica d.o.o.
Best Answers in: Computers and Software (1), Information Storage (1)
Some suggestions on backing Gmail and Facebook... I hope they help.
Kind regards,
Saso Lipic
Links:
Kai M
Professional in mobile, web, social software product managment and development. Organizer for China-related meetups.
Best Answers in: Starting Up (1), E-Commerce (1)
when you use a free web application that hosts your data, can you afford losing the data?
Just look at data loss occured at the social bookmarking site ma.gnolia. Whenever you use something in the cloud, you have to ask yourself what's the backup strategy to your most important data.
There're some free backup tools for popular services like google docs, delicious.
I am not aware of a single tool that can back up multiple online application data. But cloudsurance seems to be working on a solution.
Links:
First, I believe in general that the best answer is to back up any data you put in before putting it in. Photos? Put them on CD's or DVD's or another hard drive.
Second, for email data, use a non-web client and download all stored email in a format your email client can use, occasionally.
More Answers (1)
Usually the whole point of putting your data online (aka "in the could") is so that you don't have to worry about backing it up. Let Google use their multi-billion dollar infrastructure worry about that - you look at ads to pay for that service.
On the side note - Google just introduced offline Gmail option: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/new-in-labs-offline-gmail.html
