One of the most important factors in choosing a service provider is knowing you can leave. These days we don’t want to be locked in to a supplier whose service levels have dropped through the floor, whose product features are lagging behind their competitors or who have piled on the bells and whistles until it the one simple job you need to do takes three times as long.
Google’s launch of their data liberation site makes me far more comfortable using, and recommending, their services. Here’s a quote from Monday’s announcement:
But we believe that letting you leave our services easily actually helps us make those services better for you. Rather than locking in our users artificially, it makes us earn our users’ loyalty by building great products and constantly improving them. If we stop making our products compelling and useful, we lose you as a user. It’s just that simple.
Data Liberation: Welcome to the Data Liberation Front
The site has a comprehensive set of instructions for moving data out of Google.
One important service missing is Google Sites; but the ability to migrate content into Sites and to extract data is promised in the fall.
At the moment data extraction requires a bit of technical knowledge and effort, using a combination of protocols, feeds and data apis. It’s of most use to developers or IT Managers, though I’m sure it won’t be long before someone puts together a nice simple backup application to manage all this.
Tags: Google, backup, migration
![[del.icio.us]](http://images.del.icio.us/static/img/delicious.small.gif){kind=small}
