Gmail has made it to the front page. But at the same time, it has suffered a major problem, at least if you are one of almost half a million users whose entire email history, blogs, and Google accounts were lost.
My initial reaction was to rate this as a personal disaster, and I'm sure those affected agree, though I have no evidence of their reactions. Then I read a recent post on MinimalMac.com, and more carefully considered the issue.
Recently I have been backing up, wiping hard drives and re- installing software and data, carefully evaluating my so-called digital footprint OS on my mind.
I have all the emails except junk dating to the beginning of Gmail archived on Googles apparently unreliable servers. On my hard drive I deleted all email over a year old, as was routine in corporate life. So far, nothing has been missed.
I mercilessly deleted every photo that was not a good one. No pain there either.
I culled my music, deleting selections that I knew were on my disks simply because I could acquire them, but did not consider them particularly important to me.
Gigabytes of space were freed. And I felt no pain. So what of my digital life would cause me great emotional stress if lost?
Photos of family, friends and memories. Documents representing paid work done within the last two years. A couple of hundred songs. Maybe my tax information.
Of course, losing my writing would piss me off. So would losing photo of a second tier nature and the apps I use once in a while.
All the rest are backed up in the cloud and in at least one hard drive, or on CD/DVD or in original form or printed copies. So life would go on.
And the rest? I have already rebuilt my bookmarks, my Keychain, preferences and the other detritus that are considered personal data. It was easy. As for my blog and other writing? It still exist on the Internet somewhere, but i have never enjoyed looking back very much when I can create newer, hopefully better work.
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