And when things went missing or corrupted at the IT Dept, did you have a better success rate than Google at recovering the items?
Did you have a lower corruption/loss rate?
Google is huge, and a few problems are going to happen... And they'll be blown out of proportion. Without actual numbers to show the reliability, your guess is as good as mine about how reliable it is.
The fact that you can't get in touch with a Google engineer and hold them personally responsible doesn't mean anything. The document is just as lost either way.
And when things went missing or corrupted at the IT Dept, did you have a better success rate than Google at recovering the items?
Well we could tell the person, right then and there that we are working on it, so they know their problem is being looked at, and we knew the details of our backup schedule, because we controlled it.
Hell, for a simple "i deleted this by accident" problem, we could often retrieve it with a rightclick before the disk was purged, and if it was already purged or the document corrupted, we just went to the tape backups.
Can you tell me what Google's backup plan is? Do they even have backups for the stuff in Google Docs/Gmail? Are those backups available to free users? How long are old backups kept? What is the response time for a file retrieval request?
* The fact that you can't get in touch with a Google engineer and hold them personally responsible doesn't mean anything*
it's not about holding an engineer personally responsible, it's about transparency of the service. if you ask a (decent) IT department about their backup schedule, they will probably tell you, happily, when files are backed up and how long for, and how long it takes to retrieve them and how often they're checked for consistency.
With Google, I don't have to care how often they are backed up, or when. If a file is missing or corrupt, they deal with it automatically. I don't have to notify them.
And if a file is unrecoverable, there's no point in contacting them.
It appears the only thing gained by having a local IT Dept is being able to un-delete things you accidentally deleted. In this day and age, I solve that by just not deleting things. Google solves it by having a 'trash can' concept where you can undelete it yourself.
Did you have a lower corruption/loss rate?
Google is huge, and a few problems are going to happen... And they'll be blown out of proportion. Without actual numbers to show the reliability, your guess is as good as mine about how reliable it is.
The fact that you can't get in touch with a Google engineer and hold them personally responsible doesn't mean anything. The document is just as lost either way.