An unofficial blog that watches Google's attempts to move your operating system online since 2005. Not affiliated with Google.

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November 28, 2006

Offline Google

Felice M., from Italy, sent me this:

Last Wednesday we had, here in Italy, some big troubles connecting to Google services; we have been disconnected for two days. It was a problem with some routers of our Telecom Operator.

Reading local blogs, people underline that we are too dependent on web 2.0 services (..) In the end, we lend our data to Google in exchange for advertisements and world indexing (and marketing research etc.)

And this is telling me that we need a new feature in our Google Operating System: BACKUP.

Let's call it SNAP (snap.google.com); a service that will present me with all the Google Services I'm subscribed to (personal web site, notes, Gmail, Picasa Web, Docs & Spreadsheets, etc.), allowing me to choose the set of data I want to download to my PC for web backup purposes.

I would like to be able to choose data to download based at least on size and age, but a combination of a lot of other switches is, for sure, welcome.

8 comments:

  1. yes please do this google. i cant commit to using your services unless i know i can get my data in whatever form i might need it in the future. i need to be able to download the data in a supported way so i can use your services with confidence

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  2. Definitely agree. Have had this thought a couple of times when Internet is going loco.. Plus. You got those bizzare moments when you actually have no connection at all.

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  3. In the spirit of suggesting, I really want to be able to synchronize my Google contacts and calendar with Outlook. I read on this post that it could be done using CVS. But if Google will offer this service, then we will be able to Synch with our Pocket PC instead of entering the data twice.

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  4. I think it is dangerous to trust Google with everything. All I have now is a username and a password. What rights do I have? Can they delete all my Picasa,Gmail,blog and so on if they want to(they may have a somewhat good reason to)? Can I complain? What if someone hijack my acoount? Can I get it back? If I leave eveything with google then my whole digital existence may lay in the hands of one Google enginer.

    I like Google, but as we tend to use it more and more(pictures,videos,documents,bookmarks etc etc), we should get more assurance that our data is ours and really safe. I dont know exactly how this should be done though.

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  5. Backing up my data is my #1 concern. The apps are great but I can't invest my time and trust in an online anything. I need to have my hands on my data in a form that allows me to reconstruct my "apps suite" in a replacement environment.
    Please Ms. Google, hear our plea. Direct all of your available resources to implement an easy and effective backup for ALL of you wonderful apps. That's the way to win OUR hearts.

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  6. Or what about choice to create backup and restore on any account. Accordint to Google help, there is no possible to transfer data from one account to another. I want to move (or rename) one account to another, or create new and duplicate all data. And they told me that this is not possible - for now. There is no way to transfer all google data from one account like personal notes, search history, calendars, gmail, writely, google analitics, google video and other services to another.

    So what about create a backup, and on demand restore it - on same account or on another.

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  7. There was a problem with google from 30 october to 2/3 november caused from an hop in Milan that was crashed and google was unreachable by most of Telecom Italia users cause they rely on the same dns servers.
    Changing your dns would have been much easier...IMO the biggest problem of such situation is that any site relying on google services (analytics,adsense) was timing out....1/3 of the net was almost down.

    ReplyDelete

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