If Gmail ever tanked or became unavailable I would be in a world of trouble because there's so much information in my account it's not funny. I aggregate all my other email accounts into one Gmail account. Can't even remember the passwords of some of those other accounts.
I'm more protective of files. Those stay local. However, even the external hard disk used for backups could become unreadable with a future OS upgrade.
And yes, I also remember the 8-inch floppies. If I dig deep enough I might even dig up one or two. Probably only good for tossing them in the air to scare away the crows in the backyard.
Isaac
· 1 year ago
The Yahoo groups site will always be profitable to someone. Even if Yahoo suddenly goes away, which it will not, I am quite sure that the group functionality will survive in some form. If they went bankrupt, for instance, that product would be a prime unit to sell off to someone like Topica if nothing else (http://lists.topica.com/). No one will just throw away that many eyes. Would they?
lemon obrien
· 1 year ago
yahoo groups are better; you only think google, cause like everyone else, your told to like google; cause it's "newer" "better "google dude" truth is, yahoo, which i use for business email and website hosting, is much better.
you're part of the intellectual crowd, which, basically blogs about twitter cause, not cause twitter is great, different, or needed, but b/c there are no other stories and they have nothing to do. if ya got nothing to hype, gotta hype something.
anyway. try yahoo, i can hack google.
justcorbly
· 1 year ago
For data to remain accessible, it needs to be retained using a technology that is available when you want to do the accessing. For most of us, that means a commercially successful technology that's on the market at that moment. Who knows what that will be in the future?
I've got stuff stashed locally, on remote storage, on Gmail, etc., but I've retained paper copies of the Absolute Essentials. As long as my eyes function, and the safety deposit box doesn't disintegrate, I'll be OK.
ampressman
· 1 year ago
Oh man, this thread just gave me a minor heart attack about if we ever need to get messages out of gmail. There's no export function. Then I remembered it supports POP3 downloading of messages. Phew.
I do worry about the future given the crazy problems I had back in 2001 when I made the big switch from Windows to Mac and had to use various forms of voodoo to move simple email messages from PC Eudora to Eudora for the Mac. Something about different characters used to encode the line break in each message. And still some of the key metadata didn't cross over correctly. What good is an email message with the wrong sent and received dates?
logicalextremes
· 1 year ago
I always try to keep my data in the simplest possible format (TXT rocks!), and on as many types of media as possible. The cloud is a great convenience, but data integrity and privacy are very real issues. My email is always downloaded to my desktop, then backed up from there. People should be smart enough not to let cloud-ed data become a lock-in.
Yule Heibel
· 1 year ago
I'm thinking "Rosetta Stone" -- something to decipher the somethings (floppies, buried email accounts, etc.) from way-back...
Which brings me to your illustration for this entry. It has me going in circles.
At first I thought it was Socrates carrying a flask with hemlock. Then I thought it's a middle-aged punk going grocery shopping. Then I thought it's some old Greek with a Rosetta Stone. Then I thought it's a "Mrs. Shopper" in the manner of Monty Python (i.e., in drag), provided "she" lived in California and not in soggy England ...with a brick in her purse. Probably the Rosetta Stone.
It'll break when she conks us over the head.
dave
· 1 year ago
Actually it's Xeni Jardin from Boing Boing. :-)
Yule Heibel
· 1 year ago
Oh cripes... Well, I guess that *IS* a Rosetta Stone in her handbag, then! :-)
Xeni is so beautiful though! -- I feel tricked by art. ...Time to get out of the cave...
Brett Glass
· 1 year ago
Dave, if you want to recover the data from old CP/M disks I still have an old KayPro that runs Uniform. (Uniform was a sort of "Rosetta Stone" program which could translate between all of the old CP/M formats.) I keep that machine around because once every year or so someone asks me to salvage data from diskettes found in a basement, a safe deposit box, or an old filing cabinet.
The biggest challenge I've faced lately was to recover the data from a backup made by a backup product called "Fastback" onto old 5.25" IBM high density diskettes. It didn't use a format that anything else could read. I had to find a copy of the proprietary software, and a machine old enough to run the code (it had software timing loops that used counters that overflowed on t0o fast a machine), before I could lay hands on the data.
All Comments
If Gmail ever tanked or became unavailable I would be in a world of trouble because there's so much information in my account it's not funny. I aggregate all my other email accounts into one Gmail account. Can't even remember the passwords of some of those other accounts.
I'm more protective of files. Those stay local. However, even the external hard disk used for backups could become unreadable with a future OS upgrade.
And yes, I also remember the 8-inch floppies. If I dig deep enough I might even dig up one or two. Probably only good for tossing them in the air to scare away the crows in the backyard.
you're part of the intellectual crowd, which, basically blogs about twitter cause, not cause twitter is great, different, or needed, but b/c there are no other stories and they have nothing to do. if ya got nothing to hype, gotta hype something.
anyway. try yahoo, i can hack google.
I've got stuff stashed locally, on remote storage, on Gmail, etc., but I've retained paper copies of the Absolute Essentials. As long as my eyes function, and the safety deposit box doesn't disintegrate, I'll be OK.
I do worry about the future given the crazy problems I had back in 2001 when I made the big switch from Windows to Mac and had to use various forms of voodoo to move simple email messages from PC Eudora to Eudora for the Mac. Something about different characters used to encode the line break in each message. And still some of the key metadata didn't cross over correctly. What good is an email message with the wrong sent and received dates?
Which brings me to your illustration for this entry. It has me going in circles.
At first I thought it was Socrates carrying a flask with hemlock. Then I thought it's a middle-aged punk going grocery shopping. Then I thought it's some old Greek with a Rosetta Stone. Then I thought it's a "Mrs. Shopper" in the manner of Monty Python (i.e., in drag), provided "she" lived in California and not in soggy England ...with a brick in her purse. Probably the Rosetta Stone.
It'll break when she conks us over the head.
Xeni is so beautiful though! -- I feel tricked by art. ...Time to get out of the cave...
The biggest challenge I've faced lately was to recover the data from a backup made by a backup product called "Fastback" onto old 5.25" IBM high density diskettes. It didn't use a format that anything else could read. I had to find a copy of the proprietary software, and a machine old enough to run the code (it had software timing loops that used counters that overflowed on t0o fast a machine), before I could lay hands on the data.