Google Has All My Data – How Do I Back It Up? 215
shadeshope writes "Slowly but surely Google has taken over my computing life. How can I back it up?
Bit by bit with their mantra, hip image and brilliant services, Google has gained my trust and all my data. I am doing almost all of my computing in the cloud. Google Reader, Calender, Email, Docs and Notes have become my tools of choice; even to the point where my day book, research notes, etc., are all on Google's servers. It was just so easy, enabling me to effortlessly work from multiple computers, operating systems and locations. I know, I know, this is foolish — all my eggs are firmly in one basket. It has crept up on me. As a long-time computer user and committed pessimist, I have used many schemes over the years to ensure my data is safe. Now I have ceded all control to Google. How can I regain some control and back this all up? Is there a one-touch solution that will take all my data from the various online apps and archive it on my home server?"
Kill Somebody (Score:5, Funny)
Tried that. (Score:3, Funny)
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Easy! (Score:5, Funny)
Once you get all your data back, buy a Mac, subscribe to MobileMe and be safe, knowing that all your data is in the safe hands of a single compa...
Oh wait.
Re:Easy! (Score:5, Funny)
Idunno, Sergey. Ask Larry what he does.
Re:Easy! (Score:5, Insightful)
Once you get all your data back, buy a Mac, subscribe to MobileMe and be safe, knowing that all your data is in the safe hands of a single compa...
You chose a poor example. Pretty much all the Mobile Me services store the data both on Apple's servers and on the local machine, by default.
I know you meant this as a joke, but your suggestion actually would allow a user to regain control of their data, albeit probably not in the most flexible way.
Re:Easy! (Score:5, Informative)
There's also notMac [notmacchallenge.com], which replaces .Mac.
Looks dead (Score:2)
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Yeah, the forums recommend dotmac [walinsky.com] now.
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Though, it looks like not much is done with it -- 15 days of development in October last year.
Re:Easy! (Score:5, Interesting)
It might enable them to regain control of their future data. But they have almost certainly lost control of their current data.
About the only way of retaining control over your data whilst having a third party store it would be if you encrypt in such a way that that party will never have access to anything other than the cyphertext. Which has the side effect that you can't process that data with web based apps.
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Yeah I mean that as a joke (since a lot of people here think Apple is as evil as Google).
Any sane person using Leopard will also have Time Machine enabled, on an external hard drive, meaning a local and external backup for most people, and three backups for those also using MobileMe.
You're right, using a Mac as an example was the worst possible choice.
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Actually I have a free MobileMe trial, just really didn't have the time to really try it out yet. My backups are done via Time Machine, on a Time Capsule, with monthly backups to CD-Rs (my code isn't big enough for DVD-Rs, yet).
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"A Fool and his Data are soon parted."
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Are you talking about Captain Picard?
Uh, Google? (Score:5, Informative)
And BTW, web apps != "the cloud".
Re:Uh, Google? (Score:4, Insightful)
And BTW, web apps != "the cloud".
Huh? Google web apps, at the very least, can be considered "the cloud", unless you are arguing that the term "cloud computing" has no meaning.
Re:Uh, Google? (Score:5, Insightful)
Correct, it's an unnecessary buzzword (is that an oxymoron?) to cover something that's existed since the days of mainframes and dumb terminals. You know, that limiting, ancient paradigm that led to the microcomputer revolution because it sucked so bad? :)
Re:Uh, Google? (Score:5, Informative)
No, it's needlessly redundant.
Necessarily redundant is an oxymoron.
(And so are many people when burnt.)/jokealert
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Unless you need failover.
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You're confusing an oxymoron with a tautology.
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No, it's rhetorical tautology.
Cloud... (Score:2)
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You know, that limiting, ancient paradigm that led to the microcomputer revolution because it sucked so bad?
You mean the paradigm where data and apps are stored centrally, and some intelligence (like simple data verification) is passed out to the edge?
Seriously, Dozens-of-web-servers-in-a-DC+AJAX+browser is the pendulum swinging back to the mainframe-in-a-DC+COBOL+CICS+3270 paradigm that we-who-are-old-enough derided as horribly ancient and dinosaurish.
The reason that this paradigm survived and is returning
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In today's world of cloud computing synergies of Web 2.0, who needs backup? Information is there to be free!
Is that enough buzzwords for today?
Re:Uh, Google? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Uh, Google? (Score:5, Funny)
"How can I regain some control and back this all up?"
I suggest searching [Meth] for answers!
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Actually you bring up a very good point in your humor, with the advent of the internet and google people are becoming increasingly addicted to data. Now, considering opportunity vs time cost which is ever present in our short lives so we end up giving up more and more of our data to the websites/cloud. Privacy in the coming age will be either a product for big companies, etc, or increasingly irrelevant as the web has shown (myspace/facebook generation). It seems in order to do anything and gain peoples t
privacy (Score:2)
Privacy in the coming age will be either a product for big companies, etc, or increasingly irrelevant as the web has shown (myspace/facebook generation).
Unfortunately too many people give up their privacy with facebook/myspace, gmail, and online data storage. They use these so they'll expect others to use them too. I haven't signed up with any of them though I may join Photo.net [photo.net] when I start a photo business. Otherwise I want to keep my data local, I use an external drive for backup. And I want to run m
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And BTW, web apps != "the cloud".
Please enlighten me. What is the definition of "the cloud".
why bother? (Score:2, Insightful)
google's redundancy is legendary. why bother?
i can see if they maybe canceled a service or somesuch, but that's highly unlikely, especially for their more popular stuff. (spreadsheets, email, pictures)
i can understand the urge to keep it all local, but with their diversity, it's much more safe in their "cloud" than it would be at my house...
Re:why bother? (Score:5, Insightful)
That would work, unless Google itself deletes your account [blogspot.com] or all of your email [techcrunch.com].
Backups are meant to cover more than just hard drive failures, otherwise RAID 1/5 would be sufficient.
Also, if you can't backup your data from Google, you can't switch from Google to anyone else, so you are locked in.
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Right, and not to mention that time that they had an error and a lot of people really did lose messages.
Personally, I don't keep anything vital on google services except email. The email gets backed up via imap periodically.
This works fine for me because I don't usually have items that I'd be upset about losing, most of the things I do have are not sent over email or are easily backed up individually.
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Also, if you can't backup your data from Google, you can't switch from Google to anyone else, so you are locked in.
Switch!? What is this crazy talk!
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Maybe a better argument is for company-level control of user information rather than just user-level backups. If an employee deletes all of their e-mail, the company can't comply with document retention requirements. Likewise, deleting a user eliminates all of their data with no backup recourse.
For e-mail, I imagine what you have to do is migrate service from gmail to positini (google subsidiary) to get the added functionality.
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i agree this feature would be nice to have, but it's not really good business sense to do that... your not making it easy for your customer to leave you? (duh)
If it is easier to leave, people will be more likely to trust you in the first place. Have you ever had an obsessive ex? And you see her some time after everything settles down, and she wants to sleep with you "just one last time?" If you've ever been through that, you would know that it is a bad idea to join someone that is difficult to leave.
Personally, the whole "put personal information on somebody else's computer" fad seems weird to me.
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* shrugs shoulders * (Score:5, Funny)
I don't know ... Google it
Not sure about one-touch... (Score:5, Informative)
But Google solutions tend to at least support established open standards.
That is: You can archive your Gmail account via IMAP. You can probably download your Google Calendar appointments as an iCal file. While I'm not sure of the best way to automate it, all of your documents in Google Docs are available in OpenDocument.
Still, these are all "some assembly required".
Re:Not sure about one-touch... (Score:5, Informative)
But Google solutions tend to at least support established open standards.
That is: You can archive your Gmail account via IMAP.
You might have to rejigger some of your tags to end up with a folder structure in your IMAP archive
Otherwise it'll just be all your mail in one folder.
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/10/nested-folders-in-gmail.html [blogspot.com]
/Unless Gmail has changed something since that was written.
//Personally, I don't consider tags a replacement for folders
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//Personally, I don't consider tags a replacement for folders
I consider them to be a superset, though I do wish they were hierarchical. Writing an open-source Gmail replacement is at #3 or #4 on my list of weekend projects. Unfortunately, the first one is taking more weekends than I anticipated...
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"But Google solutions tend to at least support established open standards."
Oh really? [blogspot.com]. You must have a new definition of 'standards'.
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You appear to have linked to yet another Google technology which is used internally, which they've open sourced because they've found it useful.
It's no more relevant to this discussion than what filesystem they're using. (And, for the record, they rolled their own FS anyway.)
Remember: I said "support open standards". I didn't say "exclusively uses open standards for everything, including stuff the public was never meant to see."
Are you running on OpenFirmware? Have you flashed your BIOS with Coreboot?
No? Th
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You can use fetchmail, a UNIX/Linux command line tool to grab all of your email from your IMAP enabled Gmail account and archive it somewhere else. It can even keep headers intact so it doesn't look like you forwarded all of your email. I would suggest getting another IMAP enabled email server somewhere, whether on a webhost or elsewhere, and have fetchmail run in a daily or hourly cron job, grabbing all new email messages and forwarding them to your ba
Re:Not sure about one-touch... (Score:4, Informative)
For Google Calendar:
or
For GMail:
For Picassa:
or
For YouTube
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Of course, an electromagnetic pulse could achieve the same result on my home computer, I suppose. Life would probably go on, albeit with challenges.
Not one solution (Score:5, Informative)
Thunderbird can back up gmail, and the Zindus extension will back up you address book. Lifehacker had a story in the past month about using wget to backup your del.icio.us bookmarks; I presume it can be adapted to Googlepages and your blog. Finally, if you install Google Gears, a lot of content will be cached on your laptop. I don't know how you'd retrieve it, but at least you'd know where it was.
Re:Not one solution (Score:5, Informative)
Here are some mostly self-explanatory links:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/ [mozilla.com]
http://www.zindus.com/ [zindus.com]
http://lifehacker.com/software/download-managers/geek-to-live--wget-local-copies-of-your-online-research-delicious-digg-or-google-notebook-200360.php [lifehacker.com]
http://lifehacker.com/399407/how-to-sync-any-desktop-calendar-with-google-calendar [lifehacker.com]
http://gears.google.com/ [google.com]
It's simple! (Score:5, Funny)
why back up (Score:2, Troll)
Re:why back up (Score:5, Insightful)
Google does NOT have your backups. They have redundancy in their data storage, but when their servers get the command to delete something, it gets deleted everywhere, permanently!
See their own faq: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=50208 [google.com]
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I'm saying that if that if the Sheriff, well, to be honest, the FBI rolls in, and says, we're taking these backup tapes, then they'll have it. Not deleted.
But if you roll in and say, hey, I want my old emails, they'll say, sorry, no, we have no way of giving you just your old emails back in a timely manner.
That said, Google has resisted what it correctly considered to be unlawful demands for information.
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Yes please... Besides I did before too. :-)
Re:why back up (Score:4, Interesting)
> Google has their own backups I am sure.
What makes you think that they back up the users' data? (Note: users, not customers.)
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Not being able to restore a "user's" data, for the benefit of that user dosn't mean that they don't back it up for the benefit of someone else...
Back away, slowly... (Score:4, Insightful)
Use the Google services only where necessary. We've been doing this for a company I've started, but we only put documents and information on Google's services while we need it there. Not only is all our data on our backup server, but we only put data on their servers while it's needed. Visiting customer sites, etc.
In addition, isn't this the kind of thing that makes laptops so great? Bring it with you! There are tons of sharing apps about for various uses. Use a VPN and sshfs for remote file access. Use iCal/whatever to sync with your google calendar. That sort of thing.
In short, slowly migrate to a safer solution you're in more control of. You may lose a bit of your convenience, but safe data is worth it, in my opinion.
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[...] we only put data on their servers while it's needed. Visiting customer sites, etc. [...]
I do hope you don't put any sensitive data there, like any kind of customer data? At least at my current employer we'd grill you for good if we found out about something like this. We already have quite a hard time keeping our employees from storing company data anywhere outside approved locations. Contractors are required to sign an agreement that forbids them from doing such a thing under penalty (along with requiring them to encrypt all data they receive from us).
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Cloud Addiction (Score:5, Interesting)
This is exactly the model that all clouds will eventually mutate into
Your eggs, Google's basket.
Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment
Ask Slashdot Troll ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Does This 'Ask Slashdot' have the air of a troll to anyone else? It's like the questioner is serving it up so that every Google-hating/privacy-loving/I-told-you-so'er can go *apeshit* on it.
Re:Ask Slashdot Troll ? (Score:4, Interesting)
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It does, except that I want to know this. I have only put a few docs on Google Docs, but I'd like an easy way to back that stuff up so I never lose it. I can manually save each one, but I'd rather push a button and go eat lunch, instead.
Someone above suggested writing a script that automates it, but let's be honest... I'm lazy. If someone else writes it, that means I don't have to. If Google writes it, I'll feel pretty confident about it working and being there when I want it.
I'm not so crazy yet as to
Backing up email (Score:3, Interesting)
Use Outlook and connect to GMAIL through IMAP, then save off your email to a .PST file via the Import/Export tool.
-M
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Ewww... Outlook? PST file?! I think you're on the wrong site.
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And you want to suggest linux users to do what exactly?
I'm a pro-linux myself but he actually gave some good advice.
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Um, just because someone doesn't use or like Outlook doesn't mean they're a Linux user.
Outlook is a complicated and expensive business-oriented tool, used primarily by people who need to connect to Exchange servers. Most Windows users, if they use a desktop mail client at all, use either Outlook Express (which has nothing to do with Outlook whatsoever), its successor Windows Live Mail, or a third-party client such as Eudora or Thunderbird.
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Use Outlook and connect to GMAIL through IMAP, then save off your email to a .PST file via the Import/Export tool.
-M
I use Outlook to retrieve my gmail via IMAP. It appears that only the headers and subject line are downloaded all at once. Only until you open an individual email will it actually download the rest (including attachments).
What the heck happened? (Score:2)
I remember not so many years ago people would say here that they would never ever trust their data with an online storage company. Far too dangerous: they can read your data, what if they go bankrupt or something goes wrong and you loose your subscription, etc etc. Now suddenly people don't make local backups anymore. I wonder whose RDF is larger: Google's or Steve's?
one-touch solution? (Score:3, Informative)
Is there a one-touch solution that will take all my data from the various online apps and archive it on my home server?"
no.
Easy scripted Backup for Gmail at least (Score:3, Informative)
I use http://www.gmail-backup.com/ [gmail-backup.com] to backup my gmail accounts. It works with regular gmail and google apps gmail. It has a click and backup view, but I use the cmd line interface to automate a daily backup of all my mail and labels to a folder as .eml files. It also lets you restore to gmail if needed. It has a few quirks, but over all is very useful.
Has anyone asked Google for a restore? (Score:3, Interesting)
If I delete something at work, and then six months later think 'whatever happened to that file?', there's a chance it'll be on our backup archive and I can get it back. Or I can roll back to any of the last week's daily backups. Can Google do that? Has anyone tried? Does it keep versions?
They seem to encourage you to not delete anything, but that doesn't help with undoing several revisions of a document, does it?
I'm not a big google docs user, so I might have missed this somewhere.
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They have a revisions tab with this for spreadsheets at least. I've never used their other stuff, but I assume it would be the same.
Just a few thoughts... (Score:5, Insightful)
First, Google did not 'take over' your life or your data. You willingly gave it to them and, now that you find yourself a bit worried about the implications of one company having all of your data, you are trying to paint them as some sort of evil entity that cajoled and nearly forced you to turn over your data to them.
They didn't.
Take responsibility for your decision to hand over your data. Just because a service or company is cool and sexy doesn't give them any special powers to make you do anything. Google included.
Now, as to backing up your data, I'm not sure what the problem is. Google isn't holding your data hostage at all. With the exception of maybe Notes, you can get your data from Google to your local machine pretty easy:
Email: setup a POP3 client and download all your mail to your machine from GMail.
Documents: Go to FILE->DOWNLOAD AS and export each document to a file on your hard disk.
Reader: Spend some time looking at each feeds URL and bring them into a desktop feed reader.
Calendar: Find a tool (and there are some, I just can't think of the name now) that will allow you to bring Google Calendar data off of the server and into a local app.
The truth is you are not a slave to Google. You can leave anytime you want. That doesn't mean it's not going to take a little work on your end to do so but, then, why shouldn't it? YOU chose to go 100% with Google (as many of us have including me) and it isn't Googles responsibility to make it super simple for you to up and leave.
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Calendar: Find a tool (and there are some, I just can't think of the name now) that will allow you to bring Google Calendar data off of the server and into a local app.
For Calendars and Mail, here's what I do (Mac OS X 10.5):
What does Google owe you? (Score:4, Insightful)
Does Google owe any level of data integrity and privacy? Do they owe return of user data without claiming rights to use it otherwise? Do they make any promise of data protection and disaster recovery? What due diligence does the use owe in the process?
As we move to an environment where more and more people simply 'trust" corporations to hold and protect their (potentially personal) data, I fear that we're way ahead of the law in defining the rights and responsibilities of both users and providers. In the absence of law, providers, such as Google, will write naturally terms of use that mostly benefit themselves. Users will simply lose.
Re:What does Google owe you? (Score:5, Insightful)
> In the absence of law, providers, such as Google, will write naturally terms of use that
> mostly benefit themselves.
Real providers with whom you have a contract are obligated by law to do whatever the contract says they have to do (assuming that you hold up your end by paying the bill). Advertising agencies such as Google that provide free services for promotional purposes have no legal obligations to their "users" whatever. Nor should they.
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Erm if Google is providing a service, it's a "real provider" of that service, whether Google chooses to charge for it or not... are you suggesting there is no contractual relationship between users of Google services and Google?
I haven't read any Google ToS/EULAs (I don't use gmail et al), so I don't know their terms, but... those assuredly are contracts, and I would be pretty damn surprised if they didn't disclaim Google's liability for all sorts of things. If that were not the case, it seems like it would
Conduit or other synchronization software (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not very keen in using Google or any other services for my calendar, contacts, photos etc. data. If I'll think I'll need on-the-fly syncing, I'll rather just setup a sync server on my home server.
backdown.com (Score:2)
OK, don't go there. It's just some lousy advertising site. It's just that if it weren't taken, I might have used this domain to run the hypothetical service I've been talking about for months now: backdown, as opposed to backup. It would be just what you're talking about--something that takes all this web app crap and pulls it back down to your local box. Ideally, you should be able to change services. I began to think of this when I realized I was accumulating a lot of metadata for my photos in Flick
whatelse? (Score:2, Informative)
Documents - Use "offline access for Google Docs"
Contacts - export to CSV or vCard
calendar - export it as a private address in ical format (also XML, html)
blogs - HTTracker
photos - try picasa
what else?
important meme forgotten? (Score:2)
already to 111 posts and non one has says:
all your data are belong to google /. I am disappointed.
Have you checked out Google Gears? (Score:5, Informative)
Google Backup! (Score:2)
several solutions (Score:3, Interesting)
Mail and Calendar, you can simply back up by subscribing to them using IMAP/POP and iCal.
Google Sites, you can kind of backup with wget; just make a copy of the site from a cron job.
For Google Docs, you can use Gears; it won't be a full backup, but it will have local copies of the most important documents, and you can cut-and-paste out of that in a pinch.
In the long term, something like Gnome Conduit will probably solve this problem once and for all; until then, one just has to muddle through.
Can't add to the topic here except 'same here!' (Score:2)
What do we do?
Googles applications and services (thus far) are still completely within my 'non evil' threshold, they are useful, convienient, fast, cross platform etc etc.
Google docs has an incredibly important spreadsheet in there, which I can manually backup but interestingly I would also like to add a password to it (beyond the pass required for my google account) I wish they'd add that feature too, because if anyone ever reads that spreadsheet with malicious intent, I'm @$%#ed!
Anyone got any ideas on ho
Re: (Score:2)
To be honest, I know it's stupid but it's a spreadsheet containing my usernames and passwords to most forums (slashdot for example)
It's unlikely my password will ever be compromised but it is a concern.
Again: yes, I know it's not clever but damn it's handy, anyone who has been using the net for a while (most slashdotters) would realise after 10 years you can really chock up a huge amount of accounts on the internet (I'd estimate I have over 250 passwords, seriously)
All your data are belong to us (Score:2, Interesting)
I find that things like Picassa are OK because these are only copies of your digital stuff at home. But even then, your comments, captions and arrangements would, it seems belong to them.
goosync, mail forwards (Score:2)
I don't actually use the google stuff all that much... but I set up gmail to forward all mail to my home account.
Also I have goosync publish all my calendar and contact data from my palm onto the site. I guess I could use it to go the other way as well.
Don't know what to do about google docs, other than to export everything to local files. I really haven't used it, though the collaboration features seem interesting.
Some excerpts from the google license agreement (Score:2)
http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/users/terms.html [google.com]
You agree to comply with your company's data usage and privacy policies.
So in other words, don't put important company information on their servers without permission. In other words, that end run you are doing around your companies security policies is a violation.
You agree that Google has no responsibility or liability for the deletion or failure to store any Content and other communications maintained or transmitted by Google services.
No backups, no li
Re:stupid question (Score:5, Insightful)
What part of Sarbanes-Oxley requires they backup data that has nothing to do with their finances? I think you don't know what you're talking about. SOx is very much misinterpreted, and you're only continuing the trend.
Re:stupid question (Score:5, Informative)
The only data S-O requires Google to back up is their own financial data. They have no legal obligation whatsoever to the users of their free services. They could delete all of the OP's data right now for any reason or none and he would have no recourse.
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I thought that, all Sarbanes-Oxley states is, that Apple has to charge their customers for their updates for selected products. I believe it must mention Apple explicitely, since other companies don't charge for their updates.
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As well as being a company in a part of the world with very few data protection laws. Whilst not perfect such laws do restrict your risk of access to governments and criminals
If Google has all your data to the point you need to make this post, I think you may have other more pressing things to worry about... like the fact that it may no longer r
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyways, the result that he found was that Google doesn't *have* a phone number. Their buildings and offices do, their sales people do, but I can almost guarantee that there is no "getting to a person" for any query you might have from a technical or legal standpoint.
I guess.. on that note, have you tr
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> Has anyone ever tried calling them? I've never dealt with Google's customer service,
> but they may be helpful.
I'm sure they are, for customers. This guy, however, is not a customer. He is a user of a free service.
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When he uses the service, he looks at ads. When he looks at ads, Google makes money. Therefore, when he uses the service, Google makes money.
Hint: someone who provides you with revenue in exchange for a service is generally called a "customer".
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It's bad enough that more or less any government agency likely has access to ALL your data right now
Google has already refused a Justice Department order for data and I feel pretty confident they will refuse another order.
any talented hacker likely can GET access to it
You mean cracker, hacker is the wrong word.
Google could be SELLING your very personal data to the highest bidder
The best thing that Google has going for it is their reputation. If they start selling users' data that rep will go down the toile