Yesterday’s story from Chris Brogan about a colleague who came back from lunch to find his Google account locked out, reinforces what I have been advocating for a number of years.
Who do you trust with your data, with your rss feed, your documents, your email…… Well a lot of people trust Google with that data. What would happen today if you were locked out of your Google account forever?
Brian my creative director teased me the other day, and said I needed to get with the program and start reading email via the web, versus reading email in Thunderbird. The lock out incident yesterday reinforces the need to always have a local copy.
Some will say this is a isolated incident, and that it would never happen to me. Well what if you got locked out of your Feedburner account, or worse yet had someone hijack your account. Your audience would be in the hands of someone that was intent in stealing your account and there would be very little you could do.
How long would it take to undo the damage, who would you call first? You do realize Google really does not do live technical support. You may have to wait weeks to get your accounts back.
Here are some simple rules:
- Keep as much data as you can on your local machine
- Never let Google do what your local applications can do
- Always have a backup plane just in cast the worse happens
- Never leave or have mission critical data on a Google site
Really we all love online collaboration, my company has lived on that from day one. But we also have always taken those documents out of the cloud just in case.