...So now folks are complaining that Google *ISN'T* storing their personal data indefinitely...?

Honestly...! There's just no pleasing some people, is there!

I'm happy this happened. People treat Google like a god. Google is the greatest thing since sliced bread, Google can do no wrong, Google will never try to take over the world. It's funny. If it was anyone else, people would hate the company. After all, it IS one of (if not the) largest advertisers online. And we all know how much people love advertisements. But for some reason, people still love Google, and support them through everything (such as censoring search results in China), always saying that Google will always do the right thing simply because the company has a "Don't be evil" motto. Hey, I've got a "no work, AND pay" motto (remember Moonlighting?); want to vote me in as president?

People are constantly saying that Google is infallible. Well, guess what guys? The infallible has failed. Color me shocked. Maybe now people will realize that if something is important, make sure YOU have a backup of it. Don't trust some anonymous corporation thousands of miles away to care whether or not you lose your data.

This is pretty damned worrying.

Loosing emails and contacts stored on Gmail would be pretty bad.

At least on my local MS Outlook, I frequently backup my data. With Gmail I'm subject to someone else's backup policies.

So short sending each individual email from Gmail to another account for backup, does anyone know of any other mechanism to do it in Bulk? ... I doubt it.. :(

The IDIOTS at Yahoo spam filtering do NOTHING about blocking obvious Spam with OBVIOUS subject lines like "how bigs yoiur dick" "got 10 inches?" or Random letters and numbers. Only morons in an IT position are neglegent like this.

Yahoo sucks.

I also had my page vanish although when I clicked add bookmarks they were still listed.

Coincidently I also have google business apps on another account and I was notified that "routine" maintenance would make some of its services unavailable at about the same time that my personal settings went AWOL.

Any connection?

but at least this should distract Google from more penguin murder while they figure out what they did with the backup tapes.

No I won't give that up.. I want it written on my gravestone..

"If Google kills penguins, is it doing evil?"

Sheer genius. The title alone should grant Ashley Vance journalistic godhood.

A story slating Google and it's lost user data, and at the top of my screen is an advert for Google Checkout.

Hmmm, I'm still relatively happy to let them handle my email, but I don't think I'll be telling them my credit card number any time soon.

btw Calm down Chris

They launched a new theme changer for personalised home pages which then fecked up everything else.

Worried about gmail wiping all your carefully archived email? Just set up pop forwarding in the prefs. I crack open thunderbird once a week to pick up everything that's come through and sleep safe that the goits up at google won't be able to 'oops' accidentally delete all my shopping confirmations, signup info and software keys.

Gotta love POP!

This is why I really don't like the big online mass-storage-for-everything idea. There is no question that these services are very good indeed and that many people have a use for them. However, this recent flap demonstrates all too clearly what the risks are. One day you wake up and it's all gone and there are no guarantees you'll get it back.

We seem to be going in the direction of Larry Ellison's ideal: the network is the computer, and pretty soon all your applications may reside on some remote server.

It sounds good, don't get me wrong, but I'm really very nervous about depending on some third party to keep my sensitive data plus the foibles of their system or the net in general that decide whether or not I can get any work done or access to any kind of application at all. At home things can and do go wrong as well, that's life, but I don't look forward to the day when someone sends me a very polite email saying 'hey you want to know something: we kind of lost all your data and, we're all really sorry about that, your personal information was compromised, together with that of 15 million other people, so you may want to look out for 'unexpected results'.

I'll just keep things where they are and be happy with driving my own system.

Further to the other guy's post, yes you can easily backup your Gmail emails by using an email client like Thunderbird to get them over POP. The client will store your emails on your hard drive. You can backup your Gmail contacts by going to contacts on their webmail and click the 'export' link on the top right. That will let you save them as a csv or some such.

Easy peasy. Whether Thunderbird will let you stop Google allowing China to censor its search results is another matter, but then the collective IQ involved in these Open Source projects is vast ...

my Google home page seems to be back now, although in a subtly different style, indicating perhaps that they have reverted back to an older version of their engine?

Complete with strange boxes around each gadget

Given that users pay absolutely nothing for Google services by definition you wave your right to complain when they go wrong. The Google SLA has so much wiggle room for the company, including saying they will *not* pay any monetary compensation, you haven't got much of a leg to stand on. In fairness to Google they have never described themselves as infallible anyone that believes so is an idiot. The chances are they don't back up much if any customer data, they might have fault tolerance and mirroring, but the idea your data is being backed up to another site or other media is probably a fantasy. My mail service is also online but since it's a paid for service I know it's being backed up and has a sensible SLA why my data actually has a value. There's nothing wrong unreliable or unstable about online services except when you're expecting a 2GB+ mailbox for nothing. If your not prepared to pay anything for your data, why should you think it's any more valuable to Google?

You can configure gmail to deliver your mail (in addition to the usual gmail box) to another email account of your choosing, anywhere. Thus you get a continuously updated backup without having to run a POP client like Thunderbird. I've been doing this, works perfectly.

With google, you get (more than) you pay for, so all you whingeing wankers can put the dummy back in your pouting pie-holes.

well as far as i can see there has beena change/revamp - now the RSS feeds get put into nice little boxes - and it did remember my settings, so i'm not too peeved.

I use it for saving links etc between the three or four computers i use, along with google browser sync. I think i need to start trusting someone else though, if i lose my gmail - i'll be stuffed.

It seems fine now - I did have a brief panic yesterday as I thought I'd lost my favourite links - but frankly, it wouldn't be the end of the world if I did.

And as somebody's said already, you can hardly complain when you're given something free that (on the whole) works so well.

I might start backing up my Google-hosted data locally, but I haven't bothered so far as I figure their backup strategy is going to be a hell of a lot better than mine.

"All your information are belong to us."