Why Google, and Other Services Don’t Make Off-line Backup Tools for Their Services
Posted on August 20, 2007, under Email, Operating Systems, Software, Tools and Services.
Web services are everywhere, I do not need to go into examples like Google Docs, Gmail, Office Live, etc. Everything is moving toward the web, and the security of having everything on your local hard drive will be no more. The one thing that will prevent a lot of people, and corporations, from moving everything to a web based email or document solution is the feeling of not owning the content. To that point, the one thing that you do not see for these online services are backup tools. Why is this?
A backup tool in mine and most definitions, is an automated way of exporting all data in the event of a failure on either the service or the client side. This does not mean manually going in an exporting emails or documents, rather pressing a button and getting a local copy.
I understand that a lot of these web services are new, and a backup tool is probably not the first, or the second, feature that a Google or Microsoft would bring to market. Beyond that, what is taking so long? GMail still does not have an API, and if you apply this time line to Google Docs; it will be a while before we see it for that as well. An API would open up the ability for third party developers to create a backup application.
The way I see the answer is control. If Google or Microsoft make a way to easily backup your email or documents, it makes it that much easier to go to another service. If I were a betting man I would say that Microsoft will create a backup tool for its online services long before Google will, because Microsoft already owns the desktop and Word Processing market. For them, they need to give the ability to go from Microsoft Office on the desktop to Office Live on the server and back again seamlessly. The same goes for Windows Mail on the desktop to Live Mail on the server. This in itself is a backup solution, the ability to download your email or documents on a web service to your local hard drive. In true Microsoft fashion I see it being a closed source formats you can’t easily go over to GMail or Google Docs.
Additionally with the soon-to-be released Windows Home Server, Microsoft has another opportunity to one-up Google by giving the ability to backup Office Live or Live Mail, after all this is what the Home Server is all about; seamless backups.
The ironic thing about all of this, is choosing a business model over your customer wants and needs is sometimes enough to push someone to another service. Your thoughts?
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radiantmatrix on August 21, 2007
There is a sort of backup solution for GMail, at least for mail messages. GMail provides a POP3 interface — I back up my messages using a simple cron script that calls ‘fetchmail’ daily.
Since it’s POP3, the client downloads all messages it hasn’t seen before — this is perfect for making backups.