> I wouldn't trust any free online company to store my important data. I've > been burned many times by making that foolish assumption. I'll never do that > again. There are storage companies that do primarily storage at a reasonable > price and do it well, but it would never be my only backup.
No setup is absolutely 100% reliable, but I have yet to lose email with AOL (which does offer free IMAP access), Google or Yahoo. I have however had email and other files disappear from supposedly securely backed up providers. I do have to wonder just those folks with multiple gigs of photo or movie files will do in the near future for backup. Multiple hard drives are nice but prone to failure, DVD storage isn't perfect (and tricky with some video formats). > I do store things online, to share, and for easy retrieval. But to make that > my ONLY location--that's asking for big trouble. I'd never trust Microsoft. > Their online presence and offline programs are too unreliable. Google and > Yahoo, maybe. Amazon, no--they delete things at random without telling > owners; they even changed one of our book listings without permission. The > most reliable place I've stored things is in my Lonely Planet vault. Actually if you download your mail from Gmail automatically via IMAP, you can have a locally available copy of all your mail. In fact if Gmail is set to allow you to work offline, you also can have a locally available copy of all your email via your browser hopefully set to access Google via https. Yahoo is slightly trickier but with Thunderbird and the requisite add-ons, you once again can have access to all of your mail. Unfortunately Yahoo doesn't offer IMAP except to paying customers, and its work offline setup isn't as functional as Google. ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
