RSSData management: availability or efficiency?
Put together on March 8, 2009 10:08 pm by Dimitris
What do you think?
I was one of those affected by the recent Gmail outage and although a minor disturbance after all, it did bring back some worrisome thoughts. And by back I mean from the time before the cloud when people and especially individual users were much more isolated and on their own.
The most common answer to those affected by the recent Gmail problem was that they could use IMAP to basically get and send their email using a locally-installed email client. But that approach of protecting yourself from the scenario of Google somehow compromising your data is also problematic and not only because you get to miss all the goodies the Gmail interface has to offer on top of the actual email content. The thing that bothers me with the IMAP/POP approach is that you end up with another archive of your email – and even more so a version which you are solely responsible for as it’s stored locally.
There are all sorts of problems with this. One of the most annoying issues is that of maintaining and administering your email locally. At least if you’re conscious (or even anal depending on your point of view) about being ‘tidy’ about it, like I am, you have to keep it in sync with your online version, protect it (i.e. back it up) every time you try something potentially risky with your current operating system installation, and so on. So, thinking of these things now, it was no wonder that I very easily jumped on the Gmail solution: someone else takes care of all this. But as the outage showed it’s not that simple after all.
A few days later I came up (once more) against a similar problem which basically is about the same issue of keeping your data both online and offline. I keep all work I’m involved with in files separated in folders by project. Some of those are stored locally and some are in Google Docs (unfortunately Google Docs is just about docs…). The local files are almost mirrored online via Dropbox. But since I’m not certain if or when Dropbox might go under for any reason (and take my files with it), I keep the local files in a separate directory too – which requires syncing every now and then (fortunately that’s feasible since I don’t work on many projects at the same time). In short, as with Gmail there’s another issue of managing and administering your data.
Clearly, that’s all neither efficient nor elegant. The Offline versions of Gmail, Google Reader and Google Calendar offer something similar to what I’d like in both email and files (ubiquitous online availability with offline capabilities) but they still seem limited and somewhat experimental. Plus, I don’t want to know how someone could admin or back up these offline components (i.e. I am not sure how deep into Gears one has to be to do it). And of course the fact that they are still not mature and reliable was vividly demonstrated when things broke down with Gmail recently.
So, yes, if this sounds complicated, still in flux and too much of a fuss it’s because I still haven’t found a cool solution to minimise admin and risk issues and maximise availability and user-friendliness… Until then, I’m just doing my best keeping backups.
(Image via CrunchBase)
tags: analysis |
Digg | |  |
Del.icio.us | |  |
Ma.gnolia | |  |
Newsvine | |  |
Technorati |
Comments
Leave a Reply - in English Please
