What would you say to an IT professional

[Praktica]

Who has no local copy of important information, but relies on cloud storage?

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/spar...X7RWZPIWE/

[king1]

you do tend to rely on your email provider knowing what they're doing and by the sound of it there only 'fault', if there is one, is not having an ability to restore from backup, but that's been the case forever with most if not all email providers.

But I would say where he seriously went wrong was in doing a 'move' operation rather than a 'copy' - regardless of source/destination, if it's important stuff I will always copy first, verify it arrived correctly, only then delete, or rename the folder old_xxxxxx.

[Praktica]

I'm much less trusting - any stuff I have online has at least one local copy as well.

[king1]

I can't believe an IT pro was using Sparks webmail, that is just yuck. I've used Outlook desktop app for yonks and I can recover email data from that if worst case scenario happens, plus I have backups of the pst/ost files if needed...

[Wainuitech]

But I would say where he seriously went wrong was in doing a 'move' operation rather than a 'copy' - regardless of source/destination, if it's important stuff I will always copy first, verify it arrived correctly, only then delete, or rename the folder old_xxxxxx.

That's the Key. Should  not 100% Trust Cloud storage. 

Where it gets real fun is if web mail is all that's used, cant beat the good old install a program, Outlook, Thunderbird, EMClient etc.

About the emails -- thats where IMAP can be  dangerous, if it were a .pst file stored locally then you can always run a recovery and get things back. 

Just had to do a recovery from a customer, outlook at 73GB   ( enlarged the default .pst size a couple of times now,  yes large and been warned multiple times)  Ran a email recovery, took a couple of days to scan the file, but got mails going back over 15 years. 

he tried to move his extra mails to Microsoft Outlook

Done a couple now for people, easy as regardless of IMAP or .pst.  If .ost 1st make a backup - export the file and save as .pst then you have a full working fully safe backup.

Simply create the new account, right click the folder - Copy - To new account - the IMAP will populate, may take some time but it will do it. Once copied you can remove the original.  ALWAYS copy / Paste, not Move/Cut  Something goes wrong and you can  lose the lot. Copy fails - You swear, blame the cat and try again

[king1]

on the subject my goto recovery tool for email is 4n6 Xtraxtor
https://xtraxtor.com/

[nzoomed]

"multiple megabytes" doesnt sound like much data to backup lol

[Wainuitech]

"multiple megabytes" doesnt sound like much data to backup lol

Its not, try one of my customers 73GB in the.pst file, waiting for it to up boom LOL, considering the default from MS is 50GB. Already told him I'm not increasing any more.