Last week as all Gmail users would know, Gmail was down for several hours and left many people without access to their email. This is the perfect example of why if you use cloud services, that you should keep a copy of your most important data locally incase of an outage. One of the major problems of Cloud Computing is that if a server goes down or the Internet goes down, then people will be unable to access their data.

One way to do this, is to syncronize you cloud service to your local machine. Email can be done easily by setting it up in a mail client like Outlook or Thunderbird. Same can be done with calendars via subscribing to an iCal feed. Other services like Google Docs and Delicious do not have backup feature, but especially for Google Docs, you should make sure any document you cannot survive a multi-hour outage without, has a copy backed up on your local computer. The other issue is that there is not guarantee that these services will be around forever, so this means that you need to always have a “Plan B” incase one service goes down.