Google Apps Status Alerts

Although you'd hope this wouldn't be necessary, I applaud Google for publishing the handy Apps Status Dashboard.

With a quick glance you can see which of Google's many services are having outages or other problems.

It sure beats asking your friends, "Hey, is Gmail down for you too?"

On a self-serving side note, take a look at Gmail's status over the past few weeks - it has problems quite a bit more than you might think. Of course, you can always backup your email and stop worrying about it.

Salma Hayek's Email Hacked

Sometimes a common problem isn't noticed until it impacts a celebrity. Such is the case with email security. Salma Hayek, it is reported all across the internet, has had the misfortune of having her email address hijacked. At least to some degree, her personal email messages were copied onto blogs all around the web.

No, we will not be linking to any of that sort of thing.

But I do want to bring it up here because it's something that can happen to anyone, movie star or not. Once someone has access to your email account, can you get it back? What if, as it is reported in Ms. Hayek's case, they somehow gain access to your password, and then change it. How on earth would you get it back? How would you get your messages back? Even if you did get back in, how could you trust that compromised account in the future?

Use a backup - if Ms. Hayek had been a BackupMyMail customer, she could have downloaded a copy of her email account just as it looked the day before it was compromised. BackupMyMail keeps track of when you add and delete messages to your email account, so you can always go back in time and get a snapshot of your email account.

You can sign up here.

Twitter Lost Our Tweets

It seems that Twitter's problems a few days ago resulted in loss of the tweets for our @backupmymail account. Thankfully, we are a backup company and can do something about these sorts of problems...

Backupmytweets.com?

Keep an eye out for it.

BackupMyMail Now Supports Hotmail

BackupMyMail now supports both GMail and Hotmail (and Windows Live). So give it a try while it's still free. For a limited time, all new accounts get 30 days free.

BackupMyMail is a simple way to backup your online email account. All you need to do is sign up and input your emaili account info. BackupMyMail takes it from there. Every day, your account's contents will be copied over to the BackupMyMail servers and stored in case you need it.

To make our service even more useful, we keep track of which emails you delete so that you can download a backup of your email acount from a specific point in time. If you accidentally delete an important message today, you can download a snapshot of your account from yesterday, for example.

If you'd like to give it a try, sign up here.

Hotmail Locks Out Users

TechCrunch is reporting what many Hotmail users already know - they were completely locked out of their email accounts. For how long depends on whom you ask. Microsoft says two hours. TechCrunch readers say more. That Microsoft does not even know the scale of the problem is indicative of how complex these systems are. And as we all know, complexity goes hand in hand with down time.

To add insult to injury, users were told that they did not have an inbox at all! Microsoft says that is not the case, and that all the data is still there, but that is not something I need to see when I log into my email in the morning! Life is stressful enough.

I've been told by people that they don't need BackupMyMail because big companies like Yahoo, Microsoft and Google have good, reliable systems. I submit that while the big co's are pretty darn good, they can and do suffer major interruptions and occasional data loss. Google it - this is just one of many examples.

As more users depend on free email accounts for their important business and personal communications, these outages will become a bigger and more apparent problem. Just because it's in the cloud doesn't mean that it's not going to fail. How important is your email?

Kodak Gallery Will Delete Your Photos

I recently got an email from Kodak Gallery, the photo sharing/printing website run by the familiar camera/film manufacturer. It was the type of email you easily overlook - a change to the terms of service. In fact, I'm not sure what made me read this one in the first place, since this stuff normally winds up in the trash after 2-3 seconds of scanning.

I'm glad I did read it, because it had some pretty important information in it:

 • Members with photo storage of 2 gigabytes (GB) or less must make annual minimum purchases totaling at least $4.99.
 • Members with photo storage exceeding 2GB must make annual minimum purchases totaling at least $19.99.
Failure to meet this requirement may result in your photos being deleted from the Gallery.

This doesn't give me a warm and fuzzy feeling about how safe my data is with Kodak Gallery. And the fact that I could easily have missed this email didn't help.

This isn't entirely Kodak Gallery's fault. Overzealous marketers have been bombarding us with so much information and legalese that it's not surprising that we are conditioned to ignore even the more important messages coming from companies. And what other choice do they have? They can't call me - I'd be annoyed. They can't send me paper mail, because I'd throw it away unopened. No, the best they can do is send me an email and hope I actually read it.

But that's not good enough. The bottom line is that there are a lot of people out there who don't know that their photos are not safe from deletion on Kodak Gallery.

BackupMyMail

We're happy to announce that BackupMy.Net's first product is now available to beta customers.

BackupMyMail will back up your web-based email account. It's simple to use: you just input your email account information and we start backing it up and storing it off-site (you don't need to store it on your own computer). Your account will be checked daily and it's backup will be updated automatically. If you need a copy, you can choose any date and download your account as it looked on that date.

BackupMyMail currently supports Gmail  and Google Apps accounts, with Hotmail support just around the corner. Yahoo Mail support is coming soon. Normally $19.95 per year, we're offering free 30 day trials to beta users, so go sign up and give it a whirl. And let us know what you think of the product on our Feedback page.

Twitter Losing Tweets?

If I had a nickle for every time I heard someone say, "I don't get Twitter.", I'd be very wealthy. But if I had a penny for every time I heard someone say, "Check out this cool trick I'm doing with Twitter.", I'd be even wealthier.

As people come up with more inventive uses for Twitter, the data stored in the service becomes more valuable. Twitter is no longer consumed with "I had oatmeal for breakfast". Instead we are stating to see "Lisa took her first step today: video here- http://example.com/video" or "OMG - my plane just crashed"  or "500 error on server 2".

If you're using Twtter as a baby book, a diary, or even a server logging system, you start to get my point. Twitter is no longer confined to throw-away data. But it seems Twitter, the company, is so busy with their massive growth, that they just haven't managed to keep our data as safe as they could.

For instance, Search Twitter for "lose tweets".

It's not hard to find a user who lost a lot of their data. Now, this is a time sensitive link, and hopefully things will improve. (If you're reading this in 2011, maybe there won't be anything in the search!). But until then, it would be nice to be able to archive our tweets on our own.

Stay tuned...

Carbonite: Even Backup Companies Can Make Mistakes

It had to happen. Carbonite has lost customer data after a supplier allegedly failed to keep up the software required to make the system work. Who exactly is at fault here is unclear, but the net result is that a maker of software that allows users to backup their computers has managed to lose customer data.

The reason I bring this up is not to throw stones at companies that provide great software to millions of consumers. We applaud and encourage innovation. But scaling large software projects is very challenging work, and things will go wrong from time to time. No, the reason I write is to shine the light on the fact that we, consumers, are responsible for our own data protection.

There is no perfect system, so get to know your backup program. Understand it's strengths and weaknesses so that you can effectively evaluate it's abilities when things go wrong. Because they will. If you have files of extraordinary importance, you may just need to take extraordinary steps to back them up.

Common Sense Cloud Strategy for Your Business

Harvard professor Harry Lewis wrote a piece in BusinessWeek last August that deserves another look. In a nutshell, Lewis argues that the convenience and cost savings of cloud computing comes at a price. You cannot simple abdicate responsibility for your data to your service providers.

One of Lewis' startling points:

Does the cloud back up your data? A typical contract stipulates that you bear "sole responsibility for adequate security, protection, and backup."

That's all nice and good from the provider's point of view. But how, exactly, are businesses and individuals supposed to accomplish this? This is exactly the problem we are solving at BackupMy.Net. Stay tuned for more information on our upcoming suite of products.