How often are you backing up your cloud services?

I tend to self host as much as possible, so the emphasis is always on me to keep on top of my backups. Like most DBAs, I’m a bit of a control freak, so relying on myself suits me. Having said that, there are some services I delegate to the cloud (mail, contacts, calendar). Yesterday I was thinking about how bummed out I would be if any of these services lost my data and I suddenly got the fear. This morning I’ve had a backup frenzy. The following notes from Google give suggestions for backing up mail, contacts and calendar entries.

• Backing up your mail with POP : I used Thunderbird to download all my Gmail messages using POP. Make sure you don’t delete the messages from Gmail as you download them.
• Exporting Gmail Contacts
• Export your calendar

I was wondering how many other people bother with this? Do people even consider the impact of a goof-up by their online mail provider?

Many moons ago I used to use Blogger and I used to export my posts on a regular basis. There are some awesome blogs out there and the thought of them being lost is a nightmare. I remember Mark Rittman had a problem with his blog many years ago. Are people who have blogs hosted by Blogger or WordPress bothering with backups?

So now I’m feeling a little more secure as my PC, NAS and Google will need to go bang for me to lose my data on the cloud.

Cheers

Tim…

PS. Notice how I managed to mention cloud a few times. Gosh I’m so relevant!