I know a few people here are using Google Apps for hosting their mail servers and the like.

After having my at home mail server go offline one too many times whilst away (always while I'm away), I moved everything over to Google Apps. I had already been using the calendar and contacts to sync to my HTC HD2 now running Android so it clicked together quite well. The Gmail client works great.

Aside from the slower access to mail since it's much further away (mainly an issue whilst moving over old mail) it works great.

What's everyone's opinion on backups? Should I backup my mail? I've never heard of anyone losing their Gmail. Of course if something like that Picasa episode happens I'm stuffed but in terms of hardware failures and the like I should be pretty safe right?

I do have a couple of copies of the mail by default (since Outlook 2010 seems to want to download everything out of the box). But for the same domain, my Mum has an account and has started using just the web client. Works better for her.

Thoughts?

I have my photos that are on Picasa saved locally but Gmail I don't bother. If I lost all of my emails I have archived I wouldn't be losing much.

If I'm not able to access and verify my backups, I don't consider it backed up. In theory, this entire VPS is backed up by Gandi, but I'm paranoid enough to do regular backups to my NAS. Same goes for my mail. I have a weeks worth of backups, in 4 hour increments. This not only ensures I get most of my data back if something goes wrong with the server, but it also allows me to undelete something if I realize it happened within that week.

Google does have multiple levels of redundancy for their services like GMail. However, the recent GMail failure for 0.02% of their users did cause them to go all the way to the last line of defense, their tape backups. The real copy along with the hard drive based backups were lost. If you were one of those customers affected, a local backup would have allowed access to messages before Google restored the tape backups.

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/gmail-back-soon-for-everyone.html

Ultimately, the more copies of data you have the better when it comes to disaster recovery. For cloud stuff, I want at least one copy personally, so I can get back up and running if needed on my own schedule.

I have one of my domains using GMail servers through the free version of their Apps for Business. But I don't normally access mail via the web, so I have a copy of everything locally as well.

Even for mail accounts I access with IMAP, the Mac OS mail client keeps a local copy of everything - which I include in my Time Machine backups as well.

That's my backup strategy for gmail.

If I may ask a slightly off-topic question. How are you finding Android on your HD2? I've got a cyanogen based 2.3 build on my work phone which loads through Haret, everything works well but my data connection craps out periodically, requiring either a switch to airplane mode and back or a restart, from what I've read it's actually an issue with pppd as opposed to a radio problem. Have you had that issue?

Really? That exact issue was all over the tech headlines last week -- they lost quite a bit of gmail.

And a quick google for "gmail lost" shows that wasn't an isolated incident, with reports going back to 2006 even.

Cheers

Well OK now that I search I see but until now I truly hadn't heard of it. I guess that was personal experiences from immediate friends and contacts not hearing anything. With Outlook doing a full download of everything keeping the offline copy, that's enough for me. I'll probably just setup an account on my Mum's machine to do the same.

This is only personal mail BUT I do use it as a store for lots of things since I can just drop files into Outlook and keep them there like a filesystem.

As for Android HD2, to be honest it's good in general and stacks better than Windows Mobile 6.5 but some things do annoy me.

1) There's a hundred different versions and it's hard to figure out what is what exactly. Fortunately with Google reloading all the applications and many settings is fairly easy. I've tried about 10 different ones. Some don't even last 30 minutes before I dump them. I currently use the MAGLDR with NAND builds.

2) Current builds I've been trying seem to have Wifi problems. After x amount of time (maybe 6-12-24 hours), Wifi stops working. So at home everything stops working since it sees the Wifi AP but can't do anything more. I have to turn it off and on just like your data connection. I've not had any 3G/GSM data issues.

3) Bluetooth stack phonebook doesn't work properly with my 2004 BMW. iPhone works fine, WinMo 6.5 works fine. Also most if not all have a "kernel bug" that uses 60mA with Bluetooth on in standby which is no good for the battery.

Like others here have said, I think the best option is IMAP. Even if you don't use an email client on your desktop, it's good to just keep something free like Thunderbird on your computer that you can launch at regular intervals to back up your emails.

Unfortunately I don't know of any automated systems that will back up the calendar, docs, etc...

There is Backupify, but it isn't free.

http://www.backupify.com/business/100

Well the Contacts, Calendar and docs (Notes) are both sourced from my work Exchange server synced to my local outlook and then synced to my hosted domain. In turn they sync to my Android phone. So backing them up basically done already.

Yes that is very round about but even when I ran Windows Mobile 6.5 with ActiveSync direct to Outlook it managed to stuff the calendar up many times mainly due to issues with timezones and not understanding that whilst it's Friday here, it's still Thursday in the US.

I got locked out of my account. I assume it was hacked (early account with an attractively short ID). Couldn't get it back, no recourse, no way to discuss with google, all content lost. Not my main account so I wasn't bothered about it, but I would never rely on someone else backing up my important stuff.