Google explains, but what if it happens again?

This tuesday Gmail was down for a couple of hours in the morning, and Google quickly explained what happened on their blog, from which I quote:

(…) This morning, there was a routine maintenance event in one of our European data centers. (…)

Unexpected side effects of some new code that tries to keep data geographically close to its owner caused another data center in Europe to become overloaded, (…)

(…) The bugs have been found and fixed, and we’re in the process of pushing out changes. (…)

It’s nice to see how the problems were quickly solved and how Google’s effort to restore Gmail’s functionality was effective. On the other hand, I can’t help notice how important is Gmail (and Google) for everyone right now and how it being down launched a massive wave of messages on Twitter. Almost everyone on my Twitter friend list shouted at least one message about Gmail being down. Not just because they wanted to let everyone know, but because the lack of service was directly affecting them!

I too felt affected, seeing as I have two Gmail and 3 Google Apps accounts all linked in one Gmail inbox, which I use for both personal and work communications. So when I saw Gmail went down it was like someone shut down the lights!

There are a few tips and tricks you can do to minimize damage in case Gmail ever goes down again:

Offline Gmail: This is one of the latest features in Gmail Labs. It basically allows you to store most (usually all) of your Gmail inbox right on your PC. This means that, when this feature is activated, even if gmail is down you’ll still have access to your offline version and be able to browse through all the e-mails you had since your last sync.
I have this feature currently disabled on my personal computer, so I couldn’t test it while Gmail was down but, from what I’m told, people that had this feature turned on didn’t even noticed the problem.

Automatic Forward: You should ALWAYS have this turned on for security and backup reasons and, it goes without saying that you should be forwarding the e-mails to an e-mail account on a totally different e-mail service (preferrably one that can hold Gmail’s 7GB storage capacity).
The reason why I say this should be mandatory is simple: Gmail is a free and awesome service but, what if one day it just goes down? What if your account, for some reason gets banned and you lose all your e-mails? This way you can make sure that if something happens to Gmail’s service or to your account, you’ll have an online backup somewhere else.
Having a secondary e-mail account on another service is also usefull because if Gmail is down and you want to send a message to someone, all you have to do is use that account to compose/reply to that person with minimal hassle.

Pop3 Backups: Last but not least, POP3! Even with Gmail Offline (which I currently have enabled only on my linux boot) and automatic e-mail forwarding to another service, I still find that there’s nothing like having Outlook or Thunderbird downloading all of your e-mail and then making sure you keep your backups on a safe place. Just make sure you don’t forget to choose “keep Gmail’s copy in the Inbox” like I did on the screenshot, otherwise the whole notion of backups becomes redundant.

I might sound like I’m comming out a bit hard on this subject but, as I see it, there’s no such thing as “too much backups” and you can never be too sure about how safe you’re data really is. I learned that the hard way.

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