Best comment on GMail going down earlier today: “Just found out Gmail went down for 2 hours today and I didn’t even notice, even though they host all my email. Apparently I have a life.”
Now, I don’t want to get up on any high horses or anything. I’m as obsessive about checking my email, feed reader, social networks, and all as much as the next person; but the reaction to GMail going down for a mere two hours is astonishing to me. Apparently, I’m the only person on the intertubes that doesn’t store all my personal information online. The number of comments I’ve seen from people saying as soon as GMail is back they’re backing up their contacts list was kinda scary. Really? You never thought to keep that info on a hard drive? As a print out? Don’t people realize that these things happen? Servers go down. Sites break. Information is lost. Why would you trust an online service as the sole holder of your info, sometimes your work? Personally, I still use an email client. I haven’t been to the actual GMail page in probably a year. I’m not sure whether it was just the site that went down or if the entire service went down, but chances are I wouldn’t have even noticed. In all likelihood, had I been home I would have opened up Thunderbird, gotten an error message, and then spent the next two hours fiddling with my settings trying to get it to work again. By then, Gmail would have been back up (Ok, that’s not entirely true. I probably would have noticed due to that obsessive feed reading thing, but you get my point.).
The lesson here: don’t keep everything online. Back your stuff up. Several times. On different mediums.
Well, to be fair, bro, you probably only heard complaints from a certain clueless class, ya know? I mean, did most people even notice? I didn’t and I’m a technologist on gmail! Come on, it ain’t so bad.
Ha! True, True!
But damn, that clueless class is loud as all get out.
And y’know, you help prove the point of the quotation that starts this post. You probably didn’t notice because you have a life. Hee hee!
Oh, and I’m not trying to say that these online tools are inherently bad. I’m just saying that some folks need to learn how to back their shit up.
Another “didn’t notice” over here. I used to be pretty adamant about using an email client and shunned webmail. The only time I touch a client anymore is to backup my email and contacts. The need to access email from any computer trumped any features that something like firebird, outlook, etc had to offer (for my uses). With firefox and plugins like foxmarks, and tons of other bookmark tools out there, plus the various extensions for gmail such as BetterGmail2, GoogleGears for docs…gmail is just much more convenient. It’s not just gmail but any webmail service that people need to back up. I bet people that don’t back up their contacts and such tend not to have appropriate backups of other info at their homes in case their own pcs were to go down. People grab an external hard drive, throw on their docs and pics but don’t always know what else might be good to copy.
oops. s/firebird/thunderbird
Gmail suffers outage, world ends
http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Gmail_Suffers_Outage__World_Ends
I noticed.
Actually, I was frantically re-loading the page, thinking there was something wrong with just MY account.
Wow, I suck.
And to think people look at me funny when they find out I have all my contacts written in a paper notebook.