By now, it's a given that you're making backups to the cloud. Are you also backing the cloud up?
I'm an archivist at heart.
If it is feasible to, I'll back it up.
Nicolas Thomas perfectly capturing what my backup solution looked like!
That's one of the reasons why, still today, I can grep my IRC and ICQ logs from the nineties and dwell in that kaleidoscope of sweet chaos and shame.
I guess that was one of the reasons that, more than a decade ago, I set up a rather intricate system to backup my Gmail account. Motivated by a story of Google infrastructure failure, I started hauling my emails locally.
If you think about it, the simple fact that it's not happening more frequently is astonishing. At the end of the day, cloud providers can guarantee that your data will not be lost, but should they?
Say you're using Gmail. How far should Google go to assure data integrity? It's a matter of duplication and cost. Ultimately, Google's responsibility is to the shareholders, and the return of investment on data assurance starts dropping fast after implementing the most basic checkpoints.
If you want to read the rest of this post, learn how to backup Gmail and test the restore using Thunderbird, head on to the original blog: