A website is down! What do I do now?
Did you hear that Gmail went down, yesterday? Of course you did; it was all anyone could talk about. The panic caused by Gmail’s latest failure makes me wonder: what the heck do people do when a website or the Internet goes down?
Photo courtesy of Rajsun22
I am 25 and grew up immersed in the net since I was 11. I barely remember what it was like to go a day without checking mail, reading news online, and instant messaging my family members spread throughout the world. Now that I work from the cloud (most the information/communication I need to perform my job is tied to the Internet), a stable connection to web services has become critical. My contacts, documents, and communication streams are all online, and I typically can’t afford being slowed down by a non-working website.
What do you do when a website/service fails you?
The first thing you want to do is try to find a workaround. For a moment when Gmail.com was down, I was still able to access to my email thanks to my phone. If you have a Palm Pre, iPhone, HTC Dream, or other IMAP-enabled phone, you probably can set up your mail to sync with your device and be available even if the normal gateway is down. I was still able to search my Dream yesterday and see past communications that I needed to complete some tasks. Gmail as a whole eventually collapsed later in the day, but I was glad to have that temporary fix. You can also try Google Gears to have offline syncing on your desktop.
The next thing you want to do is make sure you have up-to-date backups. You should often backup documents and media files, even if you aren’t actively working on or using them. This goes beyond just your professional life, too. When Yahoo! Photos was shuttered in favor of flickr, my brother called me in a panic because he didn’t realize that all the photos he stored online would be lost. He didn’t save any of those photos to his computer and asked me how he could retrieve them. I sadly explained that he had just lost an entire year’s worth of photos. Backing up data is something that everyone should do regularly. You never know when the project you’re working on today requires information from a report finished two months ago. I generally try to backup my files onto an external hard drive or USB drive once a week. The ioSafe or any other stable hard drive will be a wise investment.
The third option is to look for another source or an offline solution. This won’t always be practical, but sometimes it may be necessary. Ask if the same information can be found at a competing website or without the Internet. Information has become so readily available online that younger generations often forget that there are these crazy things called knowledgeable people, books, newspapers, and libraries. I’m guilty of this, but even a web junkie like me recognizes the value of keeping up with how to solve problems offline. It’s not until the Internet fails us that we remember there’s a whole world out there that doesn’t start with www dot.
so die who cares.
If the internet goes down…. Bell Sympatico won’t be able to put up its biased, stinking, left-wing garbage homepage. It sucks.
Fourth possible solution: talk to real, live people.
Cindy….
From what hole did you emerge from? Bell Sympatico left-wing??? Not bloody likely. If you consider their site to be left-wing, you are sadly uninformed. At best, it is a little right of centre.
No wonder we are stuck with a right-wing extremist government – people like you casting votes is not only scary but a sad commentary on the state of our country.
I pity your alck of knowledge.
Wendy
HELLO, NEW ZEALAND,
I AM WRITING TO THE COMPANY THAT FIRED WOMAN WHO USED ALL CAPS IN THE E-MAIL TEXT.
WHOEVER SAYS, THAT CAPS IN THE E-MAIL SUGGEST THAT YOU SHOUT AT OTHER PERSON, HAS TO HAVE HIS / HER HEAD EXAMINED?
IT SEEMS LIKE YESTERDAY, WE SEND MESSAGES BY TELEX AND THE TEXT WAS ALL CAPS TO MAKE SURE THAT THE MESSAGE IS READABLE.
PLEASE USE CTRL + A TO SELECT ALL TEXT.
PERSONALLY, I THINK THE WORLD HAS TURNED UPSIDE DOWN, FIRING SOMEONE FOR CAPITALIZING MAIN MESSAGE IN THE E-MAIL.
HELLO EVERYONE, JUST THINK HOW WORLD’S ECONOMY WAS THEN, WHEN WE USED TELEX, AND HOW THE ECONOMY STANDS NOW?
I WOULD LIKE TO ADD THAT I AM AGAINST:
• DRINKING AND DRIVING
• DRIVING AND USING TEXT MESSAGING
• DRIVING AND TALKING ON THE CELLULAR PHONE
• USING PLASTIC BOTTLES, CONTAINERS, ETC
NEW TECHNOLOGY CONTRIBUTED TO POLLUTION OF AIR, LAND, WATER AND OUR CHILDREN’S MINDS.
I HOPE THAT EVERYONE WHO READS THIS MESSAGE UNDERSTANDS MY POINT.
GOD, BLESS YOU ALL, DO YOU HEAR ME YELLING—I HOPE NOT, DANIELA
Daniela, – with respect, your message has automatically defeated its point.
At least if Sympatico went down we’d be spared the daily updates it provides on Jennifer Aniston. I’m so sick and tired of having these updates on my homepage…it would be nice to be able to block or delete certain things…such as the extremely unimportant details of a grade z celebrity.
WHO SAID I SHOUT?!!!!
you guys should play WoW, it goes down once a week, sometimes for days!