So much for that idea

[mdlbear]

From this post by tagryn, a cautionary tale of the of relying on third-parties to store your important files and email: When Google Owns You.

One of my coworkers had an equally bad experience with Netscape Calendar: one day it was just gone. Not only had they cancelled the service, but they'd deleted all the user data. They had been careful not to tell their customers of this plan, because they "didn't want anyone to complain."

I'd been contemplating switching some of my domains over to Google for email -- Dreamhost makes it easy to set that up. Maybe not.

Yeah, almost all of my websites are third-party-hosted now. But the hosts are nothing but a mirror for the various internal working directories. And they're going to stay that way. If I can figure out how to do that with some Google's services, I may consider using a few of them.

Comments

[kyrielle]

I use google for some email. Non-critical stuff (mailing lists, for example) I let clutter up in there - if it vanishes, small loss. Other stuff (like LJ comments, and emails sent directly to me) route forward to my personal email - and Google has a copy. It's duplication, but it makes it easy to access anywhere. My friends still have my direct personal email, but at least I don't have to check gmail obsessively to see if I got an email from an LJ acquaintance using the address - but I do have a web-based cache of LJ and mailing list stuff.

I think that's the most I'd trust them with, honestly.