I really don't trust the cloud. I care about my data far more than any corporation cares.
It's tough to fight mother nature though, so I've made a big family bet on Google.
So some recent news is distressing.
It started with Google Reader. For the past week the "blogroll" feature has been broken. That's no big deal. Bugs happen, they get fixed. Problem is there's been no response from Google to what, at last count, were 38 posts from 20 authors (ok, so I posted more than once) in the Google Reader Help group.
And I thought Reader was one of Google's better products.
Today it hit Google Calendar. I'm not seeing any events that are more than a week or two in the future.
Needless to say, I'm sincerely hoping this is a transient glitch. It's not like I can restore from backup. [1]
At this rate I'm going to move from distrusting the Cloud to loathing the Cloud.
[1] Update 3/18/09: My Google cloud joy has grown so much I've a f/u post pending. I did, however, discover that there's now a feature to export all calendars as a zipped .ics file (see Calendar Settings page), so there is an awkward backup option. Of course non-automated backup is pointless, but this is a nice data freedom example. What I'd like to see is the ability to automatically archive a calendar snapshot to a google "backup"/snapshot service.
Scheduleworld.com isn't so pretty but it is the best free "octopus" plug out there and it has built into automatic sync'ing with Google Calendar.
ReplyDeleteYou can set it up to sync just so you have a backup. You could use it's web interface in an emergency or export/sync with ScheduleWorld with some other app like Outlook.