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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

#121

Post by donniezazen »

spinchange wrote: post #97
donniezazen wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google moving away from open standards is a current popular opinion in bologsphere. Google has always made it super easy to take away your data. So, if you are not happy with a company than just don't take their services.

It's not an opinion. In the case of WebDAV, they are, in fact, moving away from open standards. It's also not about data export - it's about making commitments to businesses that pay for these services under contract and in conjunction with software that may or may not work with the apps in future.

You also have to realize that nothing can be committed forever. I don't really subscribe to doomsday warnings. Open Standards is an idea and not Google's corporate policy. It will prevail as long as 'the people' care for open standards.

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#123

Post by hp50g »

reeses wrote: post #113
hp50g wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hon…

As for functionality, Maildir with your MDA of choice gives you all kinds of rube-goldberg opportunities with text files. No silly "max connections" junk when your phone and your laptop hit IMAP at the same time. The one thing I really liked when going from procmail/postfix/dovecot to Google Apps was spam filtering. I hated keeping up to date with the various new methods spammers discovered to offer me good times wit…

I use postfix+Maildir.

I never get spam. I rarely give out my address and if i do, its usually an alias unless i really trust the person. Spam? Delete the alias and get the fucker blacklisted as it deterministically points to the culprit.

I use usenet via eternal-September.org eith an alias and some junk in the address. Has worked fine for years now.

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#124

Post by jvdh »

reeses wrote: post #116
jvdh wrote: post #77

"Click “Advanced” and select your database options. A MySQL DB will be way faster than a SQLite DB." Do you really think you can really notice the microsecond that MySQL will be faster than SQLite? We are talking about a database that is going to host what, maybe 5 megabytes worth of data? We are talking about calendars and contacts here, this is not stuff that you will sync every second, and will not contain large a…

Some people have the pathological habit of creating meeting requests and attaching 500KB+ spreadsheets, project plans, Word docs, etc. It's best when they send it as a recurring appointment and then send an "updated" version in a separate email.

Still the performance of the database is going to be negligible if you take the network (probably wifi/cellular) and mostly background syncing into account.

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#125

Post by jancborchardt »

casca wrote: post #69
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…

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.

Sorry for the problems. Obviously we never want data loss to happen but sometimes it does, whether it’s error in the code or in the setup. Can you give me a link to the bug?

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#126

Post by jancborchardt »

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…

Please for any issue you have let us know in the issue tracker: http://github.com/owncloud/core/issues

Many times grave errors like file deletion are really hard to reproduce because of special setups or other errors, that’s why we need logs and more info to be able to properly debug.

Thanks!

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#127

Post by casca »

jancborchardt wrote: post #125
casca wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry for the problems. Obviously we never want data loss to happen but sometimes it does, whether it’s error in the code or in the setup. Can you give me a link to the bug?

Hi Jan,

Thank you for the work you've done on ownCloud. It's a fantastic project and it would be my first choice for hosting as I self-host everything. But a client that is willing to delete files instead of syncing them is just not worth risking for me.

Links: http://forum.owncloud.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=3148 https://github.com/owncloud/mirall/issues/328

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#128

Post by nathanb »

koenigdavidmj wrote: post #103
nathanb wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

> The incentives I have to preserve my data are greater than the incentives they have. If you lose your data, you lose your data. If Google loses your data, they probably lost that of others too, and they make the evening news.

Apparently not, since they've been losing OPs contacts for years (assuming the article is correct) and haven't made the news about it yet.

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#129

Post by rayiner »

lelandbatey wrote: post #87
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 agree with your sentiment: Honestly, is there anything that matches Google search quality of services? Is there any email hosting, paid or not, that is as feature rich as Gmail? What about online documents? Calendars and contacts? What about all the other little things I get, like Gtalk or Google hangouts? Honestly, if there was any alternative that covered all of these with the quality of Googles services, I'd swi…

Bing isn't as good as google yet, but its reached the threshold of good enough. Hosted Exchange email is very feature rich. I pay outlook.com 5 per month and get wonderful integration with all my devices for calander, contacts, and ToDo. Gtalk is hard to replace because your friends use it. I use apples messages and it works fine with people on gtalk.

For my core functioms, outlook.com is head and shoulders better. People have probably just gotten used to how utter shit the gmail UI has become, but outlook.com is refreshingly well designed (the web client). And activesync support is of course killer.

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