Protect Your Inbox from the Next Gmail Fail
Thursday, March 10, 2011 at 5:35PM On Monday, February 28, hundreds of thousands of Gmail users woke up to find their emails had vanished and they had lost their contacts. Protection against the failure of cloud-based services is something we had to figure out at People Calling People several years ago, so we are sharing our practical tips in this newsletter.
In addition to outages, users risk having their online accounts hacked, too, and we all know that there is really no responsive human tech support in the cloud. So, first go to facebook, Google, and the others and change your passwords to something different at each one and complicated with numbers and punctuation that no one will guess. Then continue reading.
The basic strategy can be summed up as the 3-2-1 backup plan. You should have three different copies of everything, in at least two different media formats, with one being off-site. The American Society of Media Photographers provides in-depth resources on this subject.
For users of web-based email such as Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo!, you must first enable IMAP in your online account. Then install Windows Live Mail 2011, Thunderbird, or another email program on your computer. Enter the recommended IMAP settings of your service provider in your email program, and be sure you set up intervals to sync automatically. It will then copy every email and folder on your PC.
Now let's make sure your precious pictures, music, videos, and documents are safe, too. Get an account at mozy.com, and it will work completely in the background, copying everything in your Documents folders to Mozy servers.
The third copy of your data should be local on an external or network drive. Use the free Microsoft program SyncToy. Do not use backup programs that lump all the data into a proprietary backup file. SyncToy will copy the files in their original form so you can see them and know that they have been copied.
The photos on your PC will flow through this overall backup process quite nicely. But what about photos uploaded directly to facebook, flickr, or other services? You can use their backup and export capabilities manually, or you can set up daily automatic backups of Gmail, Google Docs, facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and others through Backupify.
The important point to understand is that keeping everything in the cloud today is just as dangerous as it was 10 years ago when people had only one copy of their files on the PC. The odds are against you. Please act now. If you have any specific questions, we'd be happy to answer them.
