I am a big fan of Google Docs and I store quite a number of documents there so that I can access them from where ever I have an internet connection. I don’t store anything too sensitive like my bank account details etc.
If Google disappeared over night I would miss all those documents and it would take too much time to download each doc one by one. Well now Google have added an export feature where you can export all the documents into one handy zip file. Go do that backup today! Here are the step-by-step instructions:
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/10/export-google-docs.html
This opens the whole discussion of storing your data in the “cloud”.
Do you fully trust the cloud services you use? Is your only copy of your data stored in the cloud? Would you miss all your email if your email provider disappeared overnight ?
Depends on your definition of storing data in “the cloud”. I am currently using a free service (up to 5GB) known as Dropbox and my data is available in the cloud as well as on my personal machine. Dropbox provides a utility to sync both locations so that a change I make on my personal computer is “immediately” available on the web. So I no longer have to worry about carrying that USB Junk Drive around. Otherwise, I too agree, nothing too sensitive, but needed documents nonetheless are now accessible to me as long as I have an Internet connection.
Thanks for stopping by Jason. I too now use Dropbox and find it excellent especially that it works on all the main OSes. So I can drop in a file on a Windows box and access it in Ubuntu – cool. I agree that there are multiple different forms of storing data in the cloud – some with local copies and some not. Keeping a local copy and a cloud backup such as Dropbox is probably the most ideal in that even if they disappeared overnight you would still have your files. Good point!