What would you lose if your Gmail, Flickr or Facebook were deleted? | Hacker News Reader

What would you lose if your Gmail, Flickr or Facebook were deleted?

lookafteryourdata.com

30 pointsrodh25728 comments

Google has a virtual team which provides this information for all their properties: http://www.dataliberation.org/

I didn't know about that: that is a damn good argument to moving to their services. Thanks for posting.

I haven't found a way to extract google talk chat logs though.

They're not accessible along with email? (I haven't actually tried, I have to admit -- on the TODO list)

Chats are stored in an (almost complete) RFC822 compliant format on their servers. In plain HTML mode, you can click on a chat and do the "View plain message" trick to find what you need as email attachments:

1. A HTML copy of the chat 2. An XML log (XMPP) of the chat

So you can, in theory (and I have done it), crawl your GMail account (via the Plain HTML view) and grab your chats. But doing so is against their ToS and I got my account locked down for about 4 hours once. [Hint: rate limit your requests to sneak past..]

It was fun though. :)

This site is great, good on them for making it. Though when I first saw it I thought, instead of posting all these instructions (many of them tedious) why don't they just get some developers to add one click download all your data buttons to each site?

They actually recently tweeted about my site :D

These issues are certainly nothing new.

I had years of emails from the late 90s happily stored with Excite's webmail. Then, after one or another merger they instituted a policy of deleting any account that had not been signed into within 90 days. I had moved on to using desktop pop3 mail, and that was that - they deleted all of my archived messages without any recourse or so much as an apology.

I don't believe there had been any sort of export, download or backup option, either. I should have learned from that, but lo! Netscape did the same thing to me not long afterwards.

Hi HN,

I made this site as a quick way of telling less technically minded why and how they should take a copy of their cloud based information.

I must have a ton of facebook friends who have photos on there that would be permanently lost if their profile was deleted or hacked or whatever.

Thanks! I was looking for a Gmail backup - backupify.com for quite a while. Now however, thinking hard whether the risk of adding 3rd party backup service is higher than just relying solely on Gmail :)

There was a back-up service once that was revealed to store the log-in data a while ago; it was a pretty big thing.

There is absolutely no point in taking a leap of faith when it comes to handing over control of sensitive data.

It was emailing the login credentials to a gmail account (supposedly) for development purposes and was 'accidentally' left on in production.

Even users of Gmail have lost all data from Google, so it is always safer to have control of your data by backing it up (with Backupify) where you can keep your data and download it right to your PC.

Change my MX record, bitch a little bit and then get back to work.

You forgot the "brag about how you aren't affected because you do things The Right Way(tm)" part.

I save GMail via POP3, Google Docs with a Python script, and I keep originals of Flickr and Picasa photos. Fairly easy to do.

Yes, Gmail can be installed on your own domain, POP3 or SMTP all your other accounts and you're set.

I'd lose some meta-data about which photos I thought were worth uploading.

Looks like they've got spam already (Backupify), and the Gmail method sounds out of date (download quota?) despite the site apparently being new on May 2, 2010 (via the blog).

Personally, nothing. I duplicate everything important, often in multiple locations, though I should probably TrueCrypt my backups for paranoia's sake. Given my password store, in multiple locations, I can change all my site's passwords in minutes if someone gets one.

I'm thinking of putting my ssh keys into Tarsnap, as they're single-location-only right now. Any Tarsnap users have an opinion of it?

whats out of date about the Gmail method? (download quota as in your ISP data, I live in Australia, our internet still has limits, I know people on 5-8gb plans, if their Gmail is 1-2gb thats a fair bit)- Feel free to edit the page with a different wording though!

I don't have much of a problem with Backupify, as its another method that people can use, but I've updated the posting to have ($$) in the name to denote that it costs money. My hope is that there is a bunch of different methods for each different cloud based service, so I'm happy for Backupify to be one of those, would be good if there were more free ones for some of the products it covers though :)

Gmail + IMAP + offlineimap = Synchronization + Backup

I've lost too much data over the years to do anything other than treat GMail as a super fast, convenient way to access my mail in the cloud.

I have Thunderbird setup on pop3 and treat the downloaded mail data as if it were my only copy. Regular backups etc.

Flickr and Facebook don't hold anything I don't already have in my Pictures folder.

I'd gain some free time and the reminder that nothing in my gmail or any social site really matters.

Gmail...just emails really nothing earth shattering.

Facebook...I just post and have a couple pictures up. Again nothing earth shattering.

I don't use Flickr.

I guess I don't lose much at all.

I use Google as my offsite backup, so I would lose pretty much nothing except for my email address. That would be a pain.

I don't know. Maybe I would feel liberated?

Nothing.

Same as me.

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