I would say AeroFS is as easy as it gets when it comes to transferring large-size files between computers on the Internet. I use AeroFS to share photos and videos with my parents across the Pacific. Works pretty well.
To save you time, you can skip the initial rant about how closures are not taught in universities and start reading from the heading "A Concept Explained Simply".
When your hosting company goes down, you're basically stuck waiting for them.
The only way to ensure that you never have downtime is to not use the Internet, and keep all your servers connected to a nuclear reactor, all inside a mountain. That covers power and not being flooded or hit by a tornado, anyway.
Even then you'd better be careful not to trip over any of the power cables or type "rm -rf /" as root.
For mission critical things, you want to reduce the points of failure, and ensure that when things DO go wrong, you have a reasonable escalation path.
It's now been over 8 hours since it went down, and no fix from Google yet. 4+ days on the missing file.
If I was running in house, I could have entirely restored the mail server from tape by now. I could have swapped over to a hot-spare in a few minutes. I could have failed over to our backup internet service. I have a lot of options.
With Google, my option is to wait.. And hope my business doesn't lose too much money while Google gets around to fixing it.
"""So what are we doing differently? Simple. Amazon serves as “cold storage” where everyone’s valuable photos go to live in safety. Our own storage clusters are now “hot storage” for photos that need to be served up fast and furious to the millions of unique visitors we get every day. That’s a bit of an oversimplification of our architecture, as you can imagine, but it’s mostly accurate."""
You can always maintain a hot-backup, fail-over of your site on your own servers -- perhaps with reduced functionality until the scalable cloud services come back online. For a mission-critical site, this would seem to be a reasonable tradeoff.
Here's a guide to using Google Apps or any other outsourced email provider successfully:
1. Use a resilient external DNS system
2. Configure local mail clients to save messages for "offline browsing" or equivalent.
3. Use local mail client to check mail at least once a day
When email goes down, point the DNS to a pre-configured mail server. You have all your archives and shouldn't be missing any mail since delivery failures will try again not too much later.
As for the Google Docs issue, ensure that users are exporting vital docs frequently, preferably when they're done making a change. You should actually edit locally and use git. You can set it up to automatically upload changes to gdocs on push.
Okay e1ven, call this number 1.800.571.4984. Ask for Ryan. Or, if your prefer, email ryan@backupify.com or tweet @ryanatbackupify. He's our inside sales guy. Backupify can't get your lost file back, but if it happens again, we can make sure its restored in minutes, not days (or never). 30-day trial of our premium product, for you or anybody else who reads this post.
http://www.backupify.com/business/500
in other words: if google goes down, you can do other work meanwhile or go to lunch, if your system goes down, you have to spend your time/money to fix it.
If Google got things fixed over a lunch I would entirely agree with you. The problem is they take days to get started, don't give you much feedback about what the problem is, and I've never actually had a bug ticket fixed. So, yes you can keep on doing work, but you also will keep on not getting emails/business.
By crippling 3rd party software, Apple is hurting its platform the way Microsoft is hurting itself. Whether or not the hurting is intentional is beside the point.
