The idea that Google would run out of storage for its many premium services is unbelievable. Google did not run out of storage, but a misconfiguration which limited storage access did knock out many services from the Gmail app to YouTube offline for about 45 minutes. My colleague Sharon Nelson covered all of the important facts in her Ride the Lightning Blog post Google Global Outage Caused by Critical System Running Out of Storage.

A 45-minute outage can seem like an eternity when you are working on a deadline. But you know what might have been even worse than not having access to your email for an hour or so? Maybe it would be not having access to your Contacts! At least with that you can easily telephone the people who are expecting that email from you.

My personal Gmail account is mostly non-urgent email. But perhaps we all should download our Gmail contacts to a file we can access if Gmail is offline. So here from WikiHow is How to Export Gmail Contacts. It is a very simple process. Whether you do this once a year or more frequently depends on how dependent you are on this Gmail account.

Do I think there’s a realistic chance Gmail will vanish without notice and leave you permanently without access to your contacts? No. But if there’s data important to you