My business partner Rich recently posted Centralized Headaches, wherein he points out that Gmail’s recent downtime caused more problems for more people than it really should have, because people have over-relied on Gmail, to the point where many don’t have a local backup of their mail, or even a mail client – that in some ways, webmail, which moves everything to the cloud, has been a step backwards from the traditional client-server mail setup, where partial connectivity was a given.
It got me thinking, so I posted this comment:
Good points, Rich. I’d like to note that there’s a related issue: backup. Most people don’t backup their data, even that which is crucial to them. I think the basic reason for that is that it’s always been way to complicated to do so. Apple’s Time Machine offers some hope in that area; it boils backup down to its essence, and hides the complexity, so average people can backup without too many hassles. And that’s great. But consider that it took twenty-four years — from the release of the first Mac to that of OS X 10.5 Leopard with Time Machine — for us to come up with a simple, reliable, effective, and affordable solution to desktop backup for average people — and it’s still not built-in to the most common OS. And — the irony — just when we’re finally on the cusp of slaying that dragon — at least for Mac users — the game goes ahead and changes! Now people are keeping their data off of their desktops, on other “people’s” computers! Now we have this entirely new dimension to the problem, and once again, it’s being approached haphazardly, obliquely, and without coordination.
You focus here (as you frequently do) on the divide between the web and the desktop. That’s one way of looking at the problem. But if you look at it from the perspective of backup, you could re-frame the problem as a rule: important data should always exist in more than one place. And by “place”, I mean “responsible party” — I’m sure Google has a strong backup plan, but if they hold the only copy of one’s data, and their system goes down, that means that the data is at least unavailable for some period of time.
I try to follow this rule, which is why most of my “cloud” data is mirrored on my laptop, and I’ve got multiple geo-redundant backups of my laptop. I set up a desktop mail client to synchronize with my Gmail accounts using IMAP, which means I have not only a backup of my mail, but a local working copy — if Gmail goes down, I can still read and send mail.
The thing is, that’s all well and good for me, but I’m a geek. I have no illusions that we can expect average people to set up or use such a setup. So I agree with you that it’s time for the cloud service providers to step up and try to address this problem, on the behalf of their users. Gmail, for example, should provide a “Gmail Desktop” application, which would store all of a user’s mail locally and synchronize with the service. When on their own computer, a user could use the app, which would automatically provide the benefits of backup and offline use, on the fly, in the background; when away from their own computer they could still, of course, use the web interface.
Thanks for the interesting thoughts!
