Contacts and Calendars: To the cloud or local?

[Notorious Honey Badger]

For the last 1.5 years since getting an iPhone I've synched it using Outlook for the calendar and contacts. I've really liked that system in last night a mysterious glitch in outlook made it unresponsive and the only way to fix it was a format and complete system restore. So that was a complete pain in the ass.

I like the idea of using gmail to have all my contacts and calendars, its seems logical. A couple things that made me nervous tho ..
1. relying on google (or any one service for that matter) for everything
2. security of having my friends and family contact information and my calendar on the internet.

Does anyone else totally use cloud based contacts/calendars? How have you liked it? Are my concerns valid or overblown rubbish?

[photon]

I use Google for calendars and contacts exclusively, the over the air syncing is very nice. My wife does too and the ability to see each others' calendars and setup events and have another one for family stuff etc.. it's all very convenient.

Not too worried about security, and if I had to pick a service to rely on Google would be one of the ones at the top of the list.

[Russic]

To me the benefits far outweigh the possible negatives. I realize my opinion on privacy will not necessarily reflect yours, but in my mind how much danger is there really in the calendar events of my boring life getting out? If I had high profile contacts perhaps I'd think twice, but nobody out there is knocking down my door to get at my cache of contact information for crazy family members.

While it's concerning putting all your eggs in one basket in terms of service, the best course of action there would be to just do a quick export each month of your contacts and calendar so you can easily grab them should something go wrong.

[Milt Schmidt]

I use Google for contacts & calendars, every once in a while I use Thunderbird (w/ the Lightning calendar add-on) to backup everything but I've never had a problem.

Milt

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by Notorious Honey Badger

1. relying on google (or any one service for that matter) for everything
2. security of having my friends and family contact information and my calendar on the internet.
Are my concerns valid or overblown rubbish?

They are both valid and overblown rubbish.

The only way to eliminate those concerns would be to run Exchange 2010 in your own house (or preferably, data centre). Then, you have complete control over:

1. Physical security
2. Hardware monitoring & maintenance
3. Onsite and offsite backups and disaster recovery
4. Network availability and backup email spool provisioning
5. Operating system setup, configuration and security patching
6. Domain setup, configuration, and security patching
7. Operating system monitoring and security log alerting
8. Exchange 2010 configuration and availability monitoring
9. SSL certificate acquisition, renewal, deployment
10. Antispam and antivirus edge protection
11. Documentation on how to put it all back together (because NOBODY forgets to do this)

Spend a few months or years learning about all of that stuff, build it approximately 3 times over until you get it working the way you want, and pray it doesn't break while you are away on vacation.

Or, you could leave it to a company that employees hundreds or thousands of IT staff to do all of the above and generally be knowledgable and skillful in the field, and who have a vested interest in keeping the service up, stable, and secure.

So you have valid concerns, but unless you really want to become an expert in all those things, and take all the liability for handling itself, it's overblown rubbish, since there are people out there that can do it way better than you (or I), and have been doing it for a long time now.

Personally, when my current Exchange environment at home gets long in the tooth, I'll probably migrate to Microsoft's hosted Exchange (or maybe Rackspace, I dunno) - I like the idea of paying for my cloud email/calendaring/contacts, because then there are SLA's and guarantees attached to it. But either way, the big companies like MS, Google, Rackspace, etc, do a good job.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by Russic

While it's concerning putting all your eggs in one basket in terms of service, the best course of action there would be to just do a quick export each month of your contacts and calendar so you can easily grab them should something go wrong.

This is one of the reasons I feel paying for certain services is important - Google's terms of service are pretty loose:

"We are constantly changing and improving our Services. We may add or remove functionalities or features, and we may suspend or stop a Service altogether.

You can stop using our Services at any time, although we’ll be sorry to see you go. Google may also stop providing Services to you, or add or create new limits to our Services at any time.

We believe that you own your data and preserving your access to such data is important. If we discontinue a Service, where reasonably possible, we will give you reasonable advance notice and a chance to get information out of that Service."

[Azure]

We use Office 365 at work.

Outside of a screwup on our part on the 1st day of using it, we have had literally zero problems. Works great.

[Milt Schmidt]

Here's a guide to downloading backups from Google services in case you decide to go that route.

http://www.howtogeek.com/68863/how-t...and-docs-data/

Milt

[Notorious Honey Badger]

Just as a tip to those who want to sync with google, when you add your google account in your iphone you need to choose MS exchange server. if you just go with google you wont be able to sync your contacts until you plug in you phone.

its pretty cool adding and removing contacts/events on your calendar and see the update on your phone a few seconds later. awesome possum

[Notorious Honey Badger]

ok new question. I have some contacts on my gmail I only want to show in my gmail as an email, not in my phone as a full blown contact. Can I manage that?

edit: answered my own question