Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you think your hard drive is more reliable than a Google Data Center?
No, but I suspect I care more deeply about my own data than Google do.
I'm sure Google quite loves your data.
Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google
61–70 of 129 posts
Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google
#62Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google
#63This 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 agree about moving contacts and calendar off Google myself. To be honest, if it's not actually somewhere you control, it's not yours.
At least if you host or manage it yourself, you are only at the mercy of your own incompetence, whereas the cloud's competence is usually not something you can determine or anticipate regardless of SLA's and architecture. This gets demonstrated regularly if you watch the front page of this site :)
I still use text files, a VCS and a couple of editor wrapper scripts as I have for at least 20 years to solve the calendar and contacts problem.
Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google
#64This 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…
What about Google shutting down the open standard for syncing contact and calendar data across platforms?
I don't ask this as a form of "anti-Google sentiment," but as a legitimate question. The announcement that they would be phasing out ActiveSync support at the end of last year coupled with the announcement just made that they were doing the same for CalDAV/CardDav (when they announced the end of Reader) indicate they're "silo-ing" the service somewhat. Unless I've missed something, it's still not clear that iOS/iCal calendars are going to sync with Google's unless they "whitelist" Apple.
It's not a "cunning plan," it's self-preservation and keeping your stuff working or at the least not being at the mercy of a commercial concern who demonstrates a willingness to break it even for paying customers.
Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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I've run my own mail server since I got my first permanent connection in 1995. It's not hard to keep it up and reliable, especially on a small scale. It's not much harder to keep a large one up (I designed and operated a huge qmail hub in the late 90's).
Everything is on hard drives just as it is at google and all the other providers. I don't use rack and data center distribution for redundancy or even RAID to be honest.
However I do have a DLT and a fire safe (which acts as an anti-theft device as it weighs 200Kg) :)
What I'm saying is there are varying grades of redundancy, backup and reliability. It might be good enough, or might give more confidence than the disclaimers Google offer.
Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google
#66This 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…
At least it will probably prevent Google-caused privacy disasters like this from happening:
Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google
#67Android gained popularity because it was tied to Calendar and Gmail. These two services were pretty pervasive already, and so became the default in Android. When that happened, those two services became crucial to Android.
The fear that Contacts and Calendar will go away like Reader did (or, rather, will) is irrational. Reader barely had a mobile client version of it. With Google reigning in the branding on Android and requiring that it be tied even tighter to Google services, Gmail and Calendar became a dependency of Google's mobile OS.
Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google
#68So the actual article title is 'Moving your contacts and calendar away from Google', not 'Move your contacts and calendar away from Google' as it was posted here. Less of an instruction/warning than might be expected, and more of a how-to guide.
I came here to say the same thing. The two titles are actually completely different topics (ha)!
Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google
#69I 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…
I dumped ownCloud after it deleted a critical file for some unknown reason. The bug is still open. Maybe the calendar and addressbook handling is better, but I won't be trusting it.
Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, but I suspect I care more deeply about my own data than Google do.
I'm sure Google quite loves your data.
But if they lose it, do they care? It's one drop in the bucket of their analytics. The incentives I have to preserve my data are greater than the incentives they have.
On their side, they have some very bright minds and some very deep pockets, as well as a proven infrastructure. But if they lose my data, they lose some analytics which may cost them pennies or perhaps dollars of ad revenue.
On my side, I have myself and whatever advice I can cobble together from friends and the Internet, a reasonable salary, and the occasional hour or two of spare time. But if I lose my data, I lose over a decade of accumulated emails and contact information.
I will gladly allow Google to back up my data (I use gmail to archive my call logs and SMS messages right now, in fact!), but I would rather be in control of the primary copy myself.