51–60 of 457 posts
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Admittedly email has also been in my blind spot too.. Not a bad plan that.
Here is a one-click service to backup everything in your google account. Email, google drive, youtube, location history, blogger blogs, bookmarks, calendar, literally ever google service. https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout
Now, if they only could add a periodic option...
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What is the meaning of 'sharecropper' in this context? I'm aware of sharecropping in the agricultural sense[1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping
Working someone else's land, rather than owning your own. i.e. rather than using Blogger, host your own blog. This is, of course, beyond many people, which is why they use sites that handle the hosting for them. But in that situation you should be _really_ aware that they may decide to take away "your" land at any point, and thus you should keep backups.
I can never understand why people don't host important stuff/stuff they care about themselves. Webhosting and domains are cheap and even someone with little technical knowledge can create a website. There are tons of options to do that.
There is a certain feeling of frustration that comes from doing an unfamiliar and difficult technical task when you aren't at all used to doing such things. My wife's best explaination of it is that it feels like gears in your mind are grinding without oil: not moving smoothly and generating a lot of heat. I infer that many other people feel this way about web hosting, or services like weebly would not exist. The rea…
So, essentially, a paid version of archive.org, which would be a _great_ startup idea - something that I've been mulling over for quite some time.
The technical (and infrastructural/logistical) challenges in implementing/executing something like this, however, would be rather steep, imo. In most cases, a simple crawl just won't cut it, as most sites today would have been built using some sort of CMS, with a database backend, so a simple crawl and archive of the public-facing site would leave you with a (horribly) broken version of the site.
As a freelancer, I routinely come across inquiries/gigs where people changed hosts, took a backup of the webroot (and not the database), discontinued the old host and ended up with a DOA site!!
Coming back to the matter of an archiving/backup service, this could be doable notwithstanding the challenges I mentioned above. Something I would _love_ to have a go at, but beyond the means of an ordinary web tech wahm from India. (Any takers? :-))
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Admittedly email has also been in my blind spot too.. Not a bad plan that.
I started archiving all my emails a long while back. There are several good tools around, but I'm currently using offlineimap[1][2]. Easily installable via homebrew. [1]: http://www.offlineimap.org/ [2]: https://github.com/OfflineIMAP/offlineimap
You can mitigate this by having your own domain and host the email on Google Apps -- that way if they take away your access you just update your mx record to point to somewhere else. But you can also easily lose your domain name (due to malice or accident).
BTW, if an emergency does happen, anyone have a recommendation for a decent web email client that I can point my MX record to? Preferably one that has both hosted and self-hosted options. Or something that I can spin up easily on a cloud service such as AWS.
Ah yes, the "customer support by Internet shaming" strategy, the only approach that appears to work with inexplicable Google takedowns.
Given that Google's customer support has autistic tendencies to put it mildly, I do not feel sorry for them
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And don't forget to test your restore.
Actually good point that should be the first rule 0. It's not a backup unless you know it restores 1. Always take backups 2. Backup the backup
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I think the GP meant to say that you can prevent future damage to some extent through regular backups. When things have already gone wrong, it's too late to start making backups. The cloud is no different from physical media in that regard, even if the data still exists in some data centre, you can't access it any more.
I'm not aware of any tool to automate regular backups of cloud services, even though many of them have “download everything” buttons like this now (awesome). That sounds like a thing that should exist.
I can never understand why people don't host important stuff/stuff they care about themselves. Webhosting and domains are cheap and even someone with little technical knowledge can create a website. There are tons of options to do that.
As a web dev/tech freelancer, I come across typical end-users very frequently and you would be _amazed_ at the amount of ignorance about the issues like domains, hosting etc. prevailing amongst them. While people like us (you, me, and all others here) take such things in our stride, the scenario is vastly different so far as average end-users at large are concerned.
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Does three copies include the original?
I believe it does traditionally, yes. Your data plus two backup copies. Personally I'd say no though, just for the sake of having more backups (3 2 1 is minimum, not strict!). Partially unrelated I consider "cloud" as its own media type to avoid the pedantics of me storing files on a spinning disk and the cloud provider does too. Chances are they have server grade disks and their own backups. On that note, their back…
I have two off-site backups located ~150 miles from each other. If I (we) lose everything, chances are that there are more important things to worry about, like what's for dinner.
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Given that Google's customer support has autistic tendencies to put it mildly, I do not feel sorry for them
I know what you mean. But there may be autistic people reading this.