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Comment by pkfrank | Hacker News Reader

This actually raises a slightly terrifying reality.

How much would someone have to pay you to never again recover your gMail account? I would demand just an absurd payout to willingly walk away right now, with all those contacts, messages, unread e-mails, organization, etc...

Scary how much faith we put in this free service.

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The crazy thing is, the email means less to me than the chat logs. Maybe 60% of the words i've ever said to my wife have been over gchat while we're at work.

Were they the most important words you say to her, though?

Most of humanity has constantly been forgetting most of the conversation they've had with their loved ones. Maybe it is not reasonable to try to hold on to the literal incarnation of daily banalities.

What's important? I guess when I proposed, we were in the middle of Venice, so that wasn't recorded. But when we came up with the name for our dog it was. My mom got hit by a car once, I think I told her over chat. I don't see any emotional difference between chat and in person. But I can understand that some people do.

But the point is that it might not be necessary to record those conversations, even though they were large life events. Why do you need to re-read the transcript of you telling your wife that your mom got hit by a car?

But I think the point the OP was saying is that until a few years ago no-one saved those moments. And everyone survived just fine.

It's like an extension of everyone photographing every single moment of their life just because they can. Are you really going to look back over the chat log for naming your dog?

Do you actually go back and relive those moments? Do you ever go back and look over the moment when you talked about your mother's accident?

Chat history is useful for me if I was talking to a friend about a technical problem and want to review the conclusion or possible link. I've never personally delved into chat history for any other reason (perhaps a funny photo link). I've had some hilariously fun conversations on chat, but never felt the desire to relive them. I guess I'm saying if you don't actually revisit your chat history, there's really no need to feel so attached.

Not to mention that all that data will come in handy for recreating a virtual copy[1]...

On a more serious note, I also think chat logs and email are important, but I can't understand why people trust all that stuff to a third party? (I do understand why people give up any idea of privacy by giving a third party access to it, I just don't understand why the let that party have what amounts to all the copies and/or use as system that while it can be backed up, can't be replicated (If you copy your gmail via imap, you still loose something wrt. organization -- you won't be (easily) able to resume your workflow without gmail -- in contrast if you use free software you will at least have the option of hosting everything yourself in an equivalent manner).

[1] http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/Resurrection_program

You can export them. I did when I stopped using gmail.

Each one of us has the power to do something about it: Perform a Backup.

We should be downloading our mailbox with our contacts on a regular basis. I'm guilty for not doing this, but seems like an area that can use a SaaS.

Your contacts' email addresses (or at least most of mine) wouldn't do you much good if everybody left gmail all of a sudden.

Also, backing up Emails is super simple, just fire up any mail client ...

I got this error while trying to do a manual backup of a company mailbox :)

One day I'll have the time to write that script manually

Just use IMAP or POP, there's no need for a custom script. Email backs itself up :).

If you have the password. If you're backing up user mailboxes, you don't have their password.

https://www.backupify.com/ do this for Google Apps - works pretty well.

We use Backupify at TechHub. It works great.

You should definitely do backups.

But I'm pretty sure that in the vast majority of outages you'll suffer with gmail you won't have the time to recover you're backup before the service is back up.

That said, you should definitely do backups. It's just that it wouldn't have helped in this case.

I could drop it without too much pain, honestly. It wouldn't cost that much for me to delete my gmail accounts.

But I learned to own my data where it matters and not sweat the rest ages ago. (Stopped compulsively "hoarding")

the problem resides on big companies.

I use google apps for email, and it's almost impossible to backup all the mails..

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/google...

is adequate for me. What's so devastatingly wrong about that feature that makes it "almost impossible" to use?

Does IMAP not work for you?

The most painful thing is to change your e-mail in the services where you used it for sign up. The data export doesn't look hard: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/google...

That's why you use Google Apps for Domain with a domain name you have control over. That way you can switch providers but keep the same email address.

This is exactly why I've abstracted my Gmail accounts behind my own personal domain. If Gmail starts charging/gets shut down/I get tired of it, I can switch over to another email provider that supports custom MX domains.

I (almost [1]) never use my actual Gmail address.

[1] The only time I use it is for Google services (i.e. Adsense) that require a Gmail account.

More terrifying is that it's not just email.

While Gmail was down I couldn't view or edit documents in Drive.

And I also lost control of my Google Compute Engine instances, apparently since the gcutil application couldn't authenticate with my Google account.

It's very risky to put all your eggs in one basket. Why not spread stuff around?

There is a trade off between availability (spread it around) and privacy/confidentiality (the more places it is spread the more you are exposed to risks of hacking or insiders at any of the companies). There is no right answer but it depends on the person and the content.

I think you greatly reduce your risk by spreading it around. There cases where people have had a single Google or Apple account compromised and lost everything. That wouldn't have happened if their stuff had been distributed... though you'd still be in trouble with an email account hack, because of password resets and passwords sent in plain text emails.

> I think you greatly reduce your risk by spreading it around.

That only applies if loss of data/access to data is a greater problem for you than exposure of the data. Spreading it into multiple locations/services gives more choices for an attacker to breach to expose it and they only need to get into one of them.

No. It's not the same data, it's about using different sites for different services.

If you have six and one gets hacked, the other five are still secure. If you use the same site for everything, that probably increases the risk of being hacked (because a single site gives your activity more exposure), and when you are hacked, you lose all your data, not just 1/6th.

There's also a tradeoff between availability and the fact that many of Google services are simply an order of magnitude better (both in terms of functionality and user experience) than anything else out there. I happily use DropBox instead of GDrive for syncing files, but I'm yet to see an acceptable replacement for GMail.

Outlook.com is an acceptable replacement for Gmail. Have you tried it recently?

Most comparative reviews find Gmail slightly better, but there's very little in it.

http://www.maximumpc.com/best_email_service_2013 http://mashable.com/2012/08/14/outlook-vs-gmail/ http://www.pcworld.com/article/2010598/gmail-vs-outlook-com-... http://lifehacker.com/5931621/outlook-vs-gmail-a-feature+by+...

Outlook.com is an acceptable replacement for Gmail.

It's not.

I've tried for days to login to Outlook.com, and verification text messages aren't coming through.

I finally had to start the email recovery procedure, which requires a mandatory 30 day waiting period. Sigh.

I haven't; I'll check it out, out of curiosity.

Simple solution: get an Outlook.com account and get it to collect all your Gmail. Use Gmail forwarding to forward all incoming emails to your Outlook.com account, and bcc copies of outgoing mail. You now have an off-site backup.

Install a desktop client and download all your Gmail using IMAP. You now have an on-site backup, and you can use your client to send emails via Outlook.com.

It's not hard. Anybody could do this.

Gmail is just a front end for my domain name and web hosting provider's mail services. I can usually use SquirrelMail to read/respond if for some reason gmail is unreachable.

I also like that I have the option to easily switch to another front end if gmail gets too annoying or NSA-snoopy.

You should always use a backup service, and don't keep files "in the cloud" when you can help it. The goal is to have any single part of your digital life able to vanish, without losing anything important.

Using Gmail is no reason to ignore the necessity of a local backup. I use CloudPull (OS X, payware).

And please note that Gmail is not free for everyone, there are many Google Apps users.

+1 for CloudPull — it's a fantastic product.

Maybe I'm unusual, but I wouldn't be terribly upset if my two gmail accounts (totaling 6gb of stuff) were wiped clean. I'm always at 'inbox zero', so everything is really just an archive. Anyone I have in my contacts whose email address is unavailable to me elsewhere is probably not someone I'm going to be contacting, anyway, and I never, ever look at chat logs.

All in I'd probably let it go for a couple hundred bucks.

I predict that in the year 2032, when Gmail has gone bust and some russian gangster has bought the remains, the new business model of Google will be ransom: you pay us some portion of your net income last year or we publish all your emails.

Joking aside: what happens when companies that are sitting on huge chunks of extremely private data change owners and the new owners are unburdened by conscience?

Seriously, what keeps you people from at least making occasional backups via IMAP? Do you like the risk associated with what you're doing?

I pay backupify.com $5 per month to backup my gmail, gcal, gdocs, etc.

Do you trust their security?

Are you comfortable with Google data mining your secrets to sell ads?

Yes.

Fair point, but unrelated to my question :)

No.

Hm, $60 a year... that would buy you a 500 gig or 1 Tb external drive every year. Google now provides a backup feature so you could download your gmail/contacts/etc as one giant zip, then rsync it off to a couple of external drives and you have one less middleman to worry about leaking your data or going out of business and losing your backups.

I once talked to someone who woke up one day and all their gmail data was gone.

They called customer service and were informed that Google has no obligation to be dependable since it's a free service.

They called customer service? I thought that was available for paid subscriptions. You should ask that someone what phone number he/she used.

Thanks for reminding me to backup!

I'd say about tree fiddy.

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