Safe in Google's hands?
The Register is reporting a glitch in Google’s personalised page feature. People’s carefully constructed settings have vanished, and Google’s official response is that they don ‘t know what happened and they don’t know whether they’ll be able to retrieve the information. (Which, by the way, I think is a good answer – saying you don’t know when you don’t know actually builds confidence in the times you do give a positive response.)
The point is, though, the number of people whose entire online life is in the hands of one online service or another – all your email contacts stored in GMail, all your calendar likewise, word processing online, backups on a remote server, and so on. These services are all well and good, and fill a need, but don’t rely on them always to be there. Even Google could vanish overnight, and take all your details with it. If it’s important, really really make sure you have a copy yourself.
This whole topic has a personal aspect just at the moment – the main system drive for my home computer died on Wednesday. Totally dead, isn’t recognised by the BIOS at boot time, hardware-failure dead. And, of course, my last backup is three months old. Time to see how good those data recovery services are…
Back your data up, folks. External hard drives are very cheap these days. I’ve just ordered one of these – a 250 GB external drive, which is more than large enough to store everything for several years, and just plugs into a USB port, for just £55.
pax et bonum
Follow comments using Co.mments.com
Add to your del.icio.us bookmarks
