Cloud apps can be a godsend — until they stop working, taking all your data with them. Google Docs users worldwide have learned this the hard way this week, locked out of their documents by a bug which Google says is currently its #1 priority to fix, but hasn’t been able to resolve for six days and counting. The bug, associated with Google’s new multiple account login feature, causes an endless redirect when people try to open a document. Microsoft has been quick to jump on the opportunity to promote its forthcoming Office 365 service, which caches files locally, as a better solution than the all-cloud solution Google is offering. Google has been apologetic about the bug but says since it is not actually an outage it will not honor its 99.9% uptime guarantee for Google Apps Premier users.
It seems to me that with google gears, it’s possible to open, edit and save a google doc localy when no Internet connexion is available… isn’t it the same thing as the “Office 365 service, which caches files locally” ?
Obviously, but the summary just repeats what Microsoft said. What Microsoft says is just marketing.
Gears have been deprecated by google and is no longer working, I guess they are trying to integrate with html5 local storage.
However the fix is to manually signout the google account and clear the cookie (apparently clearing the cookies is not enough) and sign in with one account at a time only.
I’ve experienced this bug, but it does not lock you out of your documents. It only happens when you are logged in with multiple accounts and even then under certain conditions. It’s an inconvenience but not a disaster.
Of course there are disadvantages to using the cloud to store your documents, but I don’t think uptime is one of them. If you store your documents locally you could also loose access to them temporarily. Local documents can even get lost completely, something I think is quite unlikely to happen on Google docs.
But if they are stored in the cloud, but only cached on your system, that is the best option. That way, if you can’t access the net, or the service provider has a problem, you still have your documents on your system. Or if you hard disk goes kaput, you still have all the documents in the cloud.
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How can not having access to your documents be considered “not an outage.” They would lose my business if they had it! Stay classy Google!
Read the message above. You only lose access in certain situations. And then its easy enough to restore access by logging out of your other sessions. But you are right in that if people were locked out long term, I would call that an outage. As is, its just an inconvenience.
Quite the workaround I suppose!
At google isn’t saying you’re holding your document wrong.
Edited 2010-10-29 19:03 UTC
Well really. How many systems let you edit the same document from multiple places simultaneously? I know Windows doesn’t care about file locking, but on most other systems, you can’t do it for good reason.
Office 2007 (and I assume 2010) will lock the file while you are editing, does this on Word and Excel. I don’t think older version do.
Edited 2010-10-31 11:01 UTC
Yes, and that’s certainly better than the alternative. Although it’s still a pain when trying to work on a collaborative document… if one person leaves the window open when they go home, nobody else can touch it when they call in sick the following day. Better support for concurrent changes (or near-concurrent) would be nice…