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Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

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Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#41

Post by eddieroger »

UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #26

I like ownCloud but it is very immature. I mean it looks very snazzy right when you first install it and start to use it, but has a lot of little issues hidden under the surface. Couple of examples: Randomly deleting files because it got confused. Infinite loops. Essentially unusable on Windows servers (don't even try). etc. As I said, I like OwnCloud, and I think it has a very bright future ahead of it. But it isn't…

That's discomforting, because I just installed it. I don't really need or want the filesharing bits, but a shared family calendar has been a holy grail for my family for a while now, and this seemed to be the quickest and closest way of doing it cross-platform.

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#42

Post by Karunamon »

This seems mighty kneejerk-y. A duplicaton issue causes your contacts to disappear, therefore you should move your contacts and calendar away from a service that probably has better engineers, better backup, better redundancy, and better uptime than any one of us could possibly muster, and onto a somewhat immature product with worse functionality and integration which is by no means immune to the same kind of problem?

Yeah.. see, I don't think the author has thought their cunning plan all the way through.

I understand the anti-google sentiment is at an all time high after the Reader shutdown fiasco, but let's stay rational, here!

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#43

Post by rdl »

While it's patent/licensing encumbered, I still prefer ActiveSync based solutions, just because they do good push for iOS/Android, are easy to manage, give you "free" lightweight MDM functionality, etc.

There are a few open source ActiveSync tools (which may be in violation of Microsoft IP), but I just use a commercial one (for work). Still thinking of screwing with the free ones for a personal server vs. strictly IMAP.

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#44

Post by UnoriginalGuy »

eddieroger wrote: post #41
UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #26

I like ownCloud but it is very immature. I mean it looks very snazzy right when you first install it and start to use it, but has a lot of little issues hidden under the surface. Couple of examples: Randomly deleting files because it got confused. Infinite loops. Essentially unusable on Windows servers (don't even try). etc. As I said, I like OwnCloud, and I think it has a very bright future ahead of it. But it isn't…

That's discomforting, because I just installed it. I don't really need or want the filesharing bits, but a shared family calendar has been a holy grail for my family for a while now, and this seemed to be the quickest and closest way of doing it cross-platform.

It is a great product when it works correctly. So you should definitely give it a shot.

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#45

Post by hbharadwaj »

uslic001 wrote: post #20

Any similar setup that uses IOS phone instead of Android out there? I am tired of contacts going missing from IOS and Google or 4 copies of all my contacts showing up in both IOS and Gmail. I lost all my contacts in IOS when I upgraded to the iPhone 5. Then I had a bunch of contacts that I did not want in my contacts populate my IOS contacts when I linked my Facebook account on my IPhone 5. It is even worse on my Win…

Windows 8 allows you to merge contacts. Once you clean up your contacts on Windows, it's pretty good. Well, at least, has been for me.

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#46

Post by mikeratcliffe »

Karunamon wrote: post #42

This seems mighty kneejerk-y. A duplicaton issue causes your contacts to disappear, therefore you should move your contacts and calendar away from a service that probably has better engineers, better backup, better redundancy, and better uptime than any one of us could possibly muster, and onto a somewhat immature product with worse functionality and integration which is by no means immune to the same kind of problem…

No, the loss of contacts happened for the first time about 3 years ago and has repeated roughly every 6 months.

I don't understand why you think that Google have a better backup service than I can provide myself. I could backup my DB once per hour if I wanted.

I am not anti Google but if a better service can be run from my own server then of course I will use it.

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#47

Post by mikeratcliffe »

Yuioup wrote: post #24
lucb1e wrote: post #14

Nice URL and "Error establishing a database connection" . I smell Wordpress. Here's a cached version: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp...

Cached by Google, no less.

Google cache is a great service, like I said, I am not anti-google.

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#48

Post by bhauer »

Karunamon wrote: post #42

This seems mighty kneejerk-y. A duplicaton issue causes your contacts to disappear, therefore you should move your contacts and calendar away from a service that probably has better engineers, better backup, better redundancy, and better uptime than any one of us could possibly muster, and onto a somewhat immature product with worse functionality and integration which is by no means immune to the same kind of problem…

I only skimmed the article. But I agree with your worry that this looks to be instructions that could put anyone who follows them at even higher risk of pain. The aesthetic of the web site doesn't give me a warm and fuzzy feeling about the quality of the tools being promoted.

That said, I suspect a key point the author would make in response to our concern is that we can vigorously backup the server hosting our contacts and calendar when we host these ourselves. In fact, this point is precisely why I host so much of my own stuff: I can manage how data is handled. Synchronization notoriously sucks, and if some synchronization failure causes many records to suddenly vanish, it would be easier to restore those records from a self-maintained server than to plead with Google's support. I wouldn't know the first thing about recovering synchronization-scrubbed records from the devices themselves (e.g., an Android phone).

I suppose it would attack your point about "better backup" by asking what value that backup has if you can't easily leverage it to restore on demand.

Still, I feel your points about quality, redundancy, and uptime could not be easily countered.

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#49

Post by mikeratcliffe »

lucb1e wrote: post #19
mfer wrote: post #8

Loosing contacts can happen. Just this past week my father-in-laws contact info disappeared from Google contacts. This isn't the first time this has happened to me either.

Wtf, I've never had this happen. I would instantly stop using any service where this happened (especially where it's not possible to decently contact support).

I can happen if you have a large amount of contacts. I had 500 before this happened to me the first time.
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