Gmail's weekend data loss

Image Source: www.worcester.org 

Few months ago I wrote about our increasing dependence on Internet here: How dependent are you on Internet?. Despite the instances of data losses from internet giants being a possibility, one such instance is the recent loss of Gmail data effecting about 0.02% of its users, I am still one of those who relies on my email servers as backup for my conversations and documents exchanged via emails. In this recent Gmail incident, the bug effected all the multiple copies of the users' data Google stores in its servers. As of now Gmail team is still unable to recover the lost data completely, as the App Status page still continues to show the scary yellow wrench. 

Data loss sucks! I know it first hand since I lost years of work sometime back when a friend mistakenly formatted my hard disk. Ever since I was a little careful in making multiple copies of data. Now that buying Tera Bytes of space has become cheaper, taking data backups should not be as costly as it was earlier.

Do you also rely on your email servers and other Internet options to store your data? What precautions do you take to secure your data and prevent its loss?

Yet another change in Gmail

Looks like Google has loads of updates planned for Gmail. It all started as a simple email client. Slowly, the look and feel of the UI were changed a couple of times, and later Google Talk was integrated into Gmail. A few days back video chat was also introduced into the google talk integrated in the gmail. And now its the themes. 

While some changes made me comfortable, some others were very hard for me to take. I love gmail for its simplicity - plain colors with no jazzy effects, cool and simple interface. And this themes thingy is hard for me accept. Loved the very first version of gmail. I somehow feel its losing its charming effect with each of these new features. 

Is anyone else with me, feeling the same? 

P.S. : Apparently, Google Labs is coming up with a new feature for Gmail with which we will be able to send text messages from our IM to mobile phones. Guess, this will be a  bit hit among the youth!