Thousands see Gmail accounts wiped

Wonderful

We have a business account as well!

--
We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable. We apologise for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes.

If the issue persists, please visit the Gmail Help Centre »

Try Again Sign Out


Detailed Technical Info
Numeric Code: 93

By AlphaGeeK on 28 Feb 2011

Free?

Is a business Gmail account free? It would be dumb to run a business on a free account. Like the vans I see with hotmail account addresses written on the side. It's just not professional.

By JohnHo1 on 28 Feb 2011

Backup options

Whether you're on a free or paid-for hosted solution, it's worth having backups.

Try Backupify, which backs up Gmail elsewhere in the cloud, or imapsize which copies an imap folder structure to your local disc (both free).

http://www.backupify.com/

http://www.broobles.com/imapsize/

By JimmyN on 28 Feb 2011

Every Penny Counts

@JohnHo1

Why unprofessional for a business to use a free email account?

There are some small companies out there who struggle big time due to extremely small revenue where every single penny counts. In that case, a free email account would be a godsend, at least till revenue wasn't such an issue.

Not a criticism btw, genuinely curious.

By stormN on 28 Feb 2011

So much for cloud Computing.Always thought leaving your data in someone elses care was a bad idea.No Control over it.

By Jaberwocky on 28 Feb 2011

Ahem!

a) gmail isn't 'cloud'. It's not portable to other providers and it's not "on-demand". It's just hosted. Any hosted service needs to have demonstrable backups.
b) free services have no guarantees. If you pay for something it's fair to assume you can sue for non-provision (within the terms of your contract). Any small business (and I speak here as a sole trader myself) can charge the cost of proper email hosting back against tax.

By Steve_Cassidy on 28 Feb 2011

Its not just control over your data you lose...

Cloud computing has many potential benefits if used wisely but there are some downsides, its not just loss of data that can be a problem, you've no control over the applications themselves. Companies like Google and Yahoo et al are always tinkering with their apps. One day a feature you might rely on is there, the next day its changed in a negative way for you, or not there at all. Yahoo classic mail comes to mind, you used to be able to set up disposable emails and then just copy and paste this address into whatever website registration page you were using. Now you can still set up these disposable emails but you can no longer copy the address, only part of it!! What can I do about it? Nothing just curse under my breath every time I have to use the facility, or of course migrate to another service which is a bit of a pain in the derriere..

By rjp2000 on 28 Feb 2011

@Steve_Cassidy

a) If you have a definition of 'cloud' that enables you to state with invincible certainty that gmail isn't, why don't you share it with the rest of the industry. It is badly needed!
b) 'within the terms of your contract' is the important phrase here. You'll be lucky if you are entitled to anything more than a refund of your subscription for the time the service is down. And any liability for data loss will be so circumscribed as to be practically worthless. In practice, the only real protection is the potential for reputational damage to the provider, and that applies to free services also.

By JohnAHind on 28 Feb 2011

@stormn

Happy to respond to such a polite post. It's only my impression and my opinion, so by definition, not worth much. But you can get a web site and associated email addresses for not much, I understand. Tens of pounds pm? Sorry, can't quantify it. If you can afford the van with the sign on it surely you can afford that? Though I do take your point.

The real deal breaker is if you don't have a land line number I'm not dealing with you. I want to know you're not here today / gone tomorrow.

By JohnHo1 on 28 Feb 2011

Yet another cloud computing #fail

Yet another cloud computing #fail with user data vanishing in a puff of smoke. Having said that, online services often have problems and so anyone who didn't back up the data elsewhere was taking a rather big risk. Even IMAP accounts can be downloaded and saved. The data doesn't need to be lost.

Every time I read about failures of one or other big cloud supplier like this it moves me yet another step further away from ever using it for any business purpose - especially for application storage with thin clients at user end.

@SteveCassidy
You have a strange view of cloud computing: Google run their servers from your front room do they? LOL!

By SwissMac on 28 Feb 2011

somebloke@hotmail

I have to agree that free email accounts on the side of vans give an air of 'amateurism'. A website and associated email addresses cost as little as tenner a year! In other words you'll miss just three cooked breakfasts at the greasy spoon.

Anyone using a free email service for business needs to back up their data themselves and not whine if it goes down; it's free.

By BaseII on 28 Feb 2011

@TheUsualSuspects: the Industry already agrees that 'Cloud' has too many definitions. The architects of Cloud - principally Ray Ozzie but also Paul Maritz of VMWare - all warn of the problem of mis-sold "hotel california" Cloud products which are easy to enter and impossible to leave: the original conspet was an open market of providers of compute capacity, so you could choose the one closest to your needs *at that moment*, and move your compute job from one to another without pain or penalty. @SwissMac - I have no idea what you think I was saying, but whatever it was, it wasn't as idiotic as that.

By Steve_Cassidy on 28 Feb 2011

somebloke@hotmail

I have to agree that free email accounts on the side of vans give an air of 'amateurism'. A website and associated email addresses cost as little as tenner a year! In other words you'll miss just three cooked breakfasts at the greasy spoon.

Anyone using a free email service for business needs to back up their data themselves and not whine if it goes down; it's free.

By BaseII on 28 Feb 2011

somebloke@hotmail

I have to agree that free email accounts on the side of vans give an air of 'amateurism'. A website and associated email addresses cost as little as tenner a year! In other words you'll miss just three cooked breakfasts at the greasy spoon.

Anyone using a free email service for business needs to back up their data themselves and not whine if it goes down; it's free.

By BaseII on 28 Feb 2011

somebloke@hotmail

I have to agree that free email accounts on the side of vans give an air of 'amateurism'. A website and associated email addresses cost as little as tenner a year! In other words you'll miss just three cooked breakfasts at the greasy spoon.

Anyone using a free email service for business needs to back up their data themselves and not whine if it goes down; it's free.

By BaseII on 28 Feb 2011

refresh@BaseII

Is Hotmail more ot less 'amateurish' than posting the same comment four times? Easy on that refresh button!

By Stiggy on 28 Feb 2011

@SteveCassidy

I refer you to Wikipedia:
"Cloud computing describes computation, software, data access, and storage services that do not require end-user knowledge of the physical location and configuration of the system that delivers the services."

There is no requirement for portability, only that the service is not physically local to the end user.

What is not cloud computing? My backup hard disk sitting next to my computer. What is cloud computing? Storage that requires an internet connection to be accessed.

You seem to insist that cloud computing is ONLY internet accessed, non-local storage/service that is transferrable. That simply isn't how it is defined, nor is it how users think of it, nor is it how it is marketed or advertised.

By SwissMac on 28 Feb 2011

@SteveCassidy

There's a special computing report on cloud computing on PC pro's web site (click on the cloud tab - top right). Here's what it says on Page 3

"Whilst early efforts around on-demand were focused on large-scale contracts and compute-heavy applications, cloud computing allows companies to buy storage by the gigabyte or processing by the hour using a credit card and a web browser, or rent software – from Microsoft Office or Salesforce.com to Google Apps – either per person per month, or per year."

Seems to mention google here - does that not include Gmail?

By pauld1024 on 28 Feb 2011

@Swissmac

"computation, software, data access, and storage services that do not require end-user knowledge of the physical location and configuration of the system that delivers the services". That is an appalling definition, be it from Wikipedia or anyone else.

From the day that on-line access became available, the person using the screen has not only not NEEDED to know where all of the work was happening, they actually DID NOT know. And that's been true since the 70s and possibly before. So that definition of cloud computing needs revising I'm afraid.

By JohnHo1 on 1 Mar 2011

John hit the nail on the head

Wherever that definition comes from, it fails to meet the brief in so many ways I hardly know where to start. As John says, the very concept it presents is rash beyond belief, never mind the mismatch between that and reality. Nobody would ever say that Amazon EC2, for example, was anything but a Cloud service - do you (SwissMac) even know what "EC2" stands for?

By Steve_Cassidy on 2 Mar 2011

@SwissMac

And I would also direct you to Dick Pountain's column of a couple of years back, where he documented being explicitly barred from editing the Wikipedia version of events he was directly personally involved in. If you can resolve that little conundrum then perhaps your use of that resource as definitive will gain more credibility.

By Steve_Cassidy on 2 Mar 2011