The lovely Lindsey Mastis called me today, asking me if I would drive up to the headquarters of WUSA Channel 9: 4100 Wisconsin Avenue, NW, to make a statement and give some advice about yesterday’s Gmail outage, including my company’s worldwide use of Google Apps Premiere. I donned my monkey suit and shot up there and got to record a segment that ended up being called How To Survive A Google Outage:
WASHINGTON, DC (WUSA) — On Thursday morning at 10:30, Gmail went down. For those who rely on Google solely, work came to a halt.
But Technology Strategist Chris Abraham knew what to do.
He backs up everything.
“Have another copy in another place then you can continue working,” he said.
Abraham suggests forwarding a copy of all your e-mails to another account, like Yahoo or HotMail.
When it comes to documents stored on Google, Abraham says save a copy on your hard drive every week.
“Google also allows you to download all your contacts as either an outlook export, or as a CSV file– which is a type of data file,” he said.
There are dozens of programs online to help people and business backup their data. And you can do this for free.
Google even has a site called Apps Status Dashboard with the latest outage updates and ways to get around programs with problems.
Abraham says the only reason his company could continue to work during the outage, is because he created a backup plan ahead of time.
Segment Featured on Main Page of WUSA9
