As the web continues to evolve it seems as though more and more of our information is being kept online. This begs the question of whether your data will be available in your time of need.
Yesterday morning Google Docs suffered a 45-minute outage that left users separated from their documents. According to Webware the problem was with the servers that control the document workspace and home document listing, and it had no affect on the documents themselves. Free Google Docs users weren’t the only ones affected either… paid Google Apps users also felt the displeasure of the downtime.
For a majority of users the downtime probably went unnoticed, but I’m sure there were plenty of people who were pulling their hair out waiting for the service to come back up. Maybe you had a document you needed to hand out for a meeting, or a report that had to be turned in at school?
You know what this all reminds of? Remember the days before auto-saving when you’d lose a document you were working on because the computer crashed? It was a tough lesson, but you learned to frequently save your documents. Now the same kind of lesson is being learned from online services: you need to backup your data on to your computer, or else it might not be there when you need it.
What I think Google needs to develop here is some sort of tool that can sync a folder on your computer with Google Docs. When changes are made in one location they are replicated to the other, which means you’ll always have a version of your document available both online and offline.
That’s why you need Dropbox ([getdropbox.com])
I do like the system that Dropbox has, and the nice thing is that it mirrors the files from your local computer. It would be cool if Dropbox could integrate with Google Docs so that you could open and edit your documents stored on Dropbox, and then have them synced back to your desktop.
“What I think Google needs to develop here is some sort of tool that can sync a folder on your computer with Google Docs.”
How about install Google Gears, then all your stuff is available offline.
That’s the downside of the cloud – you have to reply on the service provider to always be up and accessible.
But if you have Offline enabled you have access to your files and the downtime wouldn’t had been such a big deal
Live Mesh is THE app for this.
Google Gears would work, but you constantly have to go online and offline with it in order for it to really synchronize your files. If you edited an app on the web you would also have to remember to grab those changes in your Google Gears. It would be cool if Google turned Google Gears into a synchronization tool where your files were always available offline without having to switch modes first.
True, it’s just too bad Google Docs can’t directly access files on Live Mesh.