

What would you lose if your Gmail, Flickr or Facebook were deleted? - rodh257
http://www.lookafteryourdata.com/

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snprbob86
Google has a virtual team which provides this information for all their
properties: <http://www.dataliberation.org/>

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wcoenen
I haven't found a way to extract google talk chat logs though.

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mark_h
They're not accessible along with email? (I haven't actually tried, I have to
admit -- on the TODO list)

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julio_the_squid
These issues are certainly nothing new.

I had years of emails from the late 90s happily stored with Excite's webmail.
Then, after one or another merger they instituted a policy of deleting any
account that had not been signed into within 90 days. I had moved on to using
desktop pop3 mail, and that was that - they deleted all of my archived
messages without any recourse or so much as an apology.

I don't believe there had been any sort of export, download or backup option,
either. I should have learned from that, but lo! Netscape did the same thing
to me not long afterwards.

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rodh257
Hi HN,

I made this site as a quick way of telling less technically minded why and how
they should take a copy of their cloud based information.

I must have a ton of facebook friends who have photos on there that would be
permanently lost if their profile was deleted or hacked or whatever.

~~~
forcer
Thanks! I was looking for a Gmail backup - backupify.com for quite a while.
Now however, thinking hard whether the risk of adding 3rd party backup service
is higher than just relying solely on Gmail :)

~~~
kmfrk
There was a back-up service once that was revealed to store the log-in data a
while ago; it was a pretty big thing.

There is absolutely no point in taking a leap of faith when it comes to
handing over control of sensitive data.

~~~
pyre
It was emailing the login credentials to a gmail account (supposedly) for
development purposes and was 'accidentally' left on in production.

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jonknee
Change my MX record, bitch a little bit and then get back to work.

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Hexstream
You forgot the "brag about how you aren't affected because you do things The
Right Way(tm)" part.

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mark_l_watson
I save GMail via POP3, Google Docs with a Python script, and I keep originals
of Flickr and Picasa photos. Fairly easy to do.

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r0s
Yes, Gmail can be installed on your own domain, POP3 or SMTP all your other
accounts and you're set.

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DannoHung
I'd lose some meta-data about which photos I thought were worth uploading.

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Groxx
Looks like they've got spam already (Backupify), and the Gmail method sounds
out of date (download quota?) despite the site apparently being new on May 2,
2010 (via the blog).

Personally, nothing. I duplicate everything important, often in multiple
locations, though I should probably TrueCrypt my backups for paranoia's sake.
Given my password store, in multiple locations, I can change all my site's
passwords in _minutes_ if someone gets one.

I'm thinking of putting my ssh keys into Tarsnap, as they're single-location-
only right now. Any Tarsnap users have an opinion of it?

~~~
rodh257
whats out of date about the Gmail method? (download quota as in your ISP data,
I live in Australia, our internet still has limits, I know people on 5-8gb
plans, if their Gmail is 1-2gb thats a fair bit)- Feel free to edit the page
with a different wording though!

I don't have much of a problem with Backupify, as its another method that
people can use, but I've updated the posting to have ($$) in the name to
denote that it costs money. My hope is that there is a bunch of different
methods for each different cloud based service, so I'm happy for Backupify to
be one of those, would be good if there were more free ones for some of the
products it covers though :)

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dan00
Gmail + IMAP + offlineimap = Synchronization + Backup

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watmough
I've lost too much data over the years to do anything other than treat GMail
as a super fast, convenient way to access my mail in the cloud.

I have Thunderbird setup on pop3 and treat the downloaded mail data as if it
were my only copy. Regular backups etc.

Flickr and Facebook don't hold anything I don't already have in my Pictures
folder.

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krav
I'd gain some free time and the reminder that nothing in my gmail or any
social site really matters.

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sigzero
Gmail...just emails really nothing earth shattering.

Facebook...I just post and have a couple pictures up. Again nothing earth
shattering.

I don't use Flickr.

I guess I don't lose much at all.

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matwood
I use Google as my offsite backup, so I would lose pretty much nothing except
for my email address. That would be a pain.

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zokier
I don't know. Maybe I would feel liberated?

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sfk
Nothing.

~~~
toppy
Same as me.

