A few weeks ago, I blogged about the fact that AOL has decided to “sunset” its venerable Xdrive online storage service. Xdrive users, not surprisingly, seem to be figuring out exit strategies–and every day, my post gets read by folks who found it via Xdrive-related Google searches.

Box.net, an Xdrive rival, dropped me a note to let me know about a new service it’s offering to would-be Xdrive Xpatriates: one-click transfers of data from Xdrive accounts to Box.net ones. Okay, it’s only one click after you’ve registered for Box.net, but it still looks pretty simple:

This isn’t for everyone–for one thing, Box.net only offers 1GB of space for free. (More space costs from $8 to $15 a month.) I actually think that’s a point in the company’s favor, since a business that actually receives money from its customers is less likely to disappear than one that doesn’t.

And chances seem very slim that AOL will announce to Xdrive users that their data is going away along with the service. Odds are that it’ll sell Xdrive to another online storage company, or strike a deal to let Xdrive users move their stuff to another service. But it pays to be prepared–and if I were an Xdrive fan, I’d do my own preparing rather than relying on AOL. Look on the bright side: There’s no such thing as having too many copies of data that’s important to you…

In my first post on today’s Gmail outage, I noted that Google’s official Gmail blog was mum on what was going on. I’m pleased to report that after Google had found and fixed the glitch, it used the Gmail blog to report that fact and apologize for the inconvenience. Google didn’t explain what happened, but as my look back at a dozen years of Internet outages shows, the explanations behind unplanned downtime are usually boring, technical, and cryptic–not particularly exciting reading unless you’re a system administrator yourself.

But the one thing about Gmail product manager Todd Jackson’s post that kinda bothers me is this aside towards the end:

“We don’t usually post about problems like this on our blog, but we wanted to make an exception in this case since so many people were impacted.”

Jackson goes on to suggest that people who encounter Gmail problems check out Gmail’s online help and user group for the fastest updates; fair enough. But I hope that Google isn’t too cautious about using its many official blogs to discuss problems with its services and what it’s doing about them. A corporate blog that alerts users to cool new features can be useful; one that’s a comprehensive guide to the services it covers–warts and all–can be invaluable.

Thinking back to AOL’s famous string of humiliating outages in the mid-1990s, one of the things that got the company through them was CEO Steve Case’s letters to AOL users. They were proto-blog posts, prominently displayed on the AOL home page and pretty open about the service’s hiccups, of which there were many.

Today, even Apple is using blogs to deal with MobileMe’s ongoing issues–in a somewhat halting and stilted fashion, but at least it’s trying.

So please, Google (and every other Internet company I deal with): Err on the side of addressing the challenges you and your customers face on your blogs. Apologies are appreciated, but a generally up-front approach to explaining what happened, what you’re doing about it, and whether it might happen again is much more important than “I’m sorry.”

Someday we’ll all tell our grandkids about what we were doing during the great Gmail outage of August 11th, 2008. Well, okay, probably not–Google’s e-mail service was down for only a couple of hours, which is relatively brief as Internet outages go. But when one of the world’s most popular mail systems goes missing even briefly, zillions of people are inconvenienced and want to share their frustration. In a weird way, it’s a huge compliment: If Gmail wasn’t essential, nobody would care if it went away.

For a dozen years or so now, the Internet has been a mainstream communications medium, and its history has been pockmarked with examples of big-time services choking for extended periods–often a lot longer than today’s Gmail blip. The most famous examples of unplanned downtime have a lot in common: They usually last longer than anyone expected and get blamed on cryptic technical glitches. Almost always, angry consumers announce they’re done with the service in question; almost always, the service eventually recovers.

Oh, and one more thing: The biggest and most embarrassing failures all seem to happen during the summer months. Maybe technology, like human beings, just doesn’t work quite as hard when the weather’s hot and there are distractions like baseball games, picnics, and vacations to contemplate.

Now that Gmail’s back, it’s worth recapping a few other outages that made headlines when they happened–and since the ones that follow are in alphabetical order, they begin with maybe the most famous one of all (hint: it involved a company whose initials are A.O.L.)…

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Here’s an insight: It’s never a great feeling to wake up to the possibility that an Estonian is running around with a homemade ATM card for your bank account. This and other news after the jump.
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So AOL is cutting back on a lot of its online properties, and one of the unlucky ones is Xdrive, the venerable online service whose current incarnation provides 5GB of free Internet storage space. We don’t know much about what’ll happen to the service other than what’s in an internal AOL memo that’s been published at TechCrunch–that it’s being “sunsetted”–which is usually a code-word for “gradually wound down rather than abruptly shuttered” and that AOL is “exploring” how to migrate Xdrive users’ data in a way that provides “the best possible transition experience.” TechCrunch also says that AOL is trying to sell Xdrive for $5 million.

That would seem to suggest that AOL decided to close Xdrive before figuring out exactly what to do with all those terabytes of data that its users have stored on their Xdrives. And the Xdrive site doesn’t mention the service’s apparent. impending doom. Actually, it’s still touting itself as a fabulous option for backup up vital data.

Sounds like there’s at least some chance that Xdrive will survive in a form that makes the transition seamless for its users–or at least doesn’t leave them having to figure out what to do with their data. But now would not be a good time to sign up for an Xdrive account.

The news comes at the same time that Yahoo is closing its online music store and getting ready to turn off its DRM servers–and therefore telling paying customers that they won’t be to get access to their music from new computers after September.

All of which is a hassle for AOL and Yahoo customers but a perversely useful reminder that online services are fungible, fragile things. You can’t assume they’ll be around forever–no matter what you were told when you signed up, and even if they come from gigantic companies. As Pogo once said of life itself, they ain’t nohow permanent.

Which leaves me mulling over the online services I use, and what I’d do if they vanished. I’ve got a Gmail account with gigabytes of mail, some of it very important. And even though I still buy most of my music on CD and rip it, I’ve paid Apple for a fair amount of stuff on the iTunes store.

The chances that Gmail will be “sunsetted” anytime soon or that Apple will give up on its DRM servers are as close to nonexistent as is possible in the real world. But will Gmail and iTunes be around in ten years? Probably. Twenty? Quite possibly. Thirty, forty, or fifty? It’s certainly conceivable, but who knows?

Bottom line: When it comes to your data and content, paranoia is isn’t just healthy, it’s essential. Some of the services you use may outlive all of us, but it makes sense to act like they might disappear tomorrow…