Try this old chestnut on for size: prevention is better than cure. It is also said that hindsight is 20/20. Some Gmail users will be experiencing the emotional mechanics of these two philosophical musings after the online email giant “lost” the entire contents of 148 000 user accounts earlier in the week. We thought we’d share a little advice.

Ben Treynor, the Vice President of Engineering for Gmail, explained that even though email account data is stored in multiple places, sometimes software bugs have their way.

And this is exactly what happened to a portion of Gmail users on Monday as Daddy explained in Monday Morning Spice.

Gmail says it does keep hard copies of the information offline but this is also the reason it was taking slightly longer to restore the “lost” accounts.

Anyway, the point we are making is that there are many of you that probably use an online-based email account service, and we don’t want this happening to you.

Numerous companies also make use of the Gmail integrated domain name service that drives Google App accounts (that’s the one that lets you have your own domain name running through Gmail).

Hence you see why it wouldn’t be fun if it did actually happen to you.

So, solution time: backup your account often. How? Transfer your account settings to your supplied mail software programme on your machine; thereby ensuring that mails are automatically stored on your hard drive. That’s what we call “manual override”.

There are also software products available that do the same thing in countless ways, just have a google.

[Source: Techland]